Herbcraft

Herbcraft operates as a lo-fi psychedelic rock ensemble based in Portland, Maine, whose hallucinatory and spiritually focused improvisations probe themes of devotion. Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Matt Lajoie directs the project, having first gained notice through his free-folk outlet Cursillistas. That earlier group issued more than a dozen recordings between 2005 and 2011, the majority appearing on Lajoie’s own L'animaux Tryst (Field) Recordings imprint, with two additional albums coming via Digitalis and scattered tapes plus CD-Rs surfacing on Blackest Rainbow, Time-Lag Records, and Cabin Floor Esoterica. Lajoie phased out Cursillistas around 2009 and turned instead to an electrically oriented, cosmic strain of psych-rock that departed from the mostly acoustic and delicately abstract folk approach of his prior work. Herbcraft emerged in June 2010 with the album Discovers the Bitter World of Agartha, which Lajoie produced and recorded in full before its release on the Hello Sunshine label. Papers followed several months later as a limited cassette co-produced with Ian Paige and issued by Fuck It Tapes, the cassette-only arm of Jeremy Earl’s Woodsist operation. Hello Sunshine next put out the 2011 LP Ashram to the Stars, while the British imprint Julia Dream Recordings released the limited cassette Flowering in 2012. After those largely solo efforts, Herbcraft shifted into a more collective mode. The 2013 Woodsist album The Astral Body Electric broadened the group’s sonic range, pairing Lajoie with Dawn Aquarius, Nicholas Barker, Aaron Neveu, Doug Tuttle—who tracked the record straight to tape inside an eighteenth-century barn using analog techniques—and producer Matt Valentine. Personnel then stabilized as the trio of Lajoie, Neveu on drums, and Joe Lindsey on bass and organ. Their debut release under this configuration was the 2014 7-inch single “Push Thru the Veil,” a funky, brisk Krautrock-inflected track produced by Neveu. The song also surfaced on the 2015 Woodsist LP Wot Oz, which continued the move toward uptempo, improvisational psych-rock with three of its six tracks extending past the ten-minute mark.