The Answer Is In The Beat

Longmont Potion Castle: 16 (D.U. Records, 2019)

August 31, 2019 at 7:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Now that the Longmont Potion Castle documentary Where In The Hell Is The Lavender House? has come into existence, we’ve been afforded a tiny glimpse into the world of the mysterious prank caller/sound artist, but there’s still so many unanswered questions and it’s likely we’ll never know exactly how his mind works. Even seeing inside his home studio and observing him doing what he does, there’s no way to explain how he’s able to quickly come up with absurd names or nonsensical details, or how he has the nerve to repeatedly call people and just refuse to back off for so long. LPC 16 just came out, and it doesn’t answer these questions any more than the movie did, but it’s just as entertaining all the same. There’s more instances of him going “oh no, don’t do that” whenever someone threatens to call the cops on him, and lots of “oh yeah, sure, uh-huh, big time” with crazy echo whenever someone tries to ask what address he has or other pertinent information. After screenings of the documentary, he’s been doing live phone calls, and some of those found their way onto this album. There’s an audience applauding at the end of the opening medley, and best of all, “Flashback Takeout” was recorded after the Detroit screening of the movie. I was there and I was doubling over with laughter the entire time. He calls a pizza place and asks for some pizzas (one small, one extra large) and breadsticks with triple pineapple and pepperoni, and he keeps piling on delay so his order gets extremely confusing. An absolutely timeless LPC moment, preserved for all eternity. Other highlights include “Barn Door”, where he keeps playing around with a creaky door sound effect and looping his voice and asking for WD40 or something to fix it, and “Peacock”, an epic 11 minute chain of several businesses being connected to each other asking each other for books with titles like Peacock, Warlock, and Bangkok, with several mysterious sound effects strewn throughout. And on “Liter of Salad” he keeps mixing up measurements of various foods for his order, and keeps responding to the guy’s laugh with a really cheesy electronically altered laugh of his own.