Wooden Shjips

San Francisco's enigmatically named Wooden Shjips play a minimal, droning brand of garage-styled psychedelia with a noticeable '60s Krautrock influence. The band's vocals slip beneath waves of throbbing minimal rhythms, while fuzz tone guitar and shrieking organs jump to the foreground. When bandleader Ripley Johnson assembled the group in 2003, he wasn't interested in playing gigs or becoming famous; rather, his original intention was to find a group of non-musicians for the purposes of creating innovative music. The idea was that untrained players would have a brand new outlook on music and could bring something fresh to the table, perhaps a blend of the often noisy trance rock of the Velvet Underground and the frenetic mania of the one-hit wonder garage punks of the early '60s. Bassman Dusty Jermier, for example, was originally recruited to play sax, an instrument he'd never picked up before. Other members from that first incarnation often had such a lack of interest in playing live, the band hardly bothered looking for gigs. Eventually, Wooden Shjips whittled itself down to a more productive lineup comprising Dusty Jermier on trumpet and bass, drummer Omar Ahsanuddin, organ player Nash Whalen, and guitarist/vocalist Johnson. They knew that what they were doing wasn't going to be profitable, but Johnson was a big fan of impenetrable albums and arcane small-press poetry books, having grown fascinated by books that go unread for decades or out-of-print albums that are finally rediscovered by collectors and praised as lost gems. With that in mind, the band set about to make purposely obscure records that Johnson envisioned leaving in libraries, thrift store bargain bins, and on park benches. The band's debut 10" vinyl offering had three tunes: "Shrinking Moon for You"...