The Physics House Band's 2013 debut EP Horizons/Rapture was intoxicating at worst and mind-bending at best. A fantastical instrumental mix of genres, the six track release was something to decipher and enjoy, as its layers unfolded listen after listen.

After a painful four year wait, the Brighton trio have returned with Mercury Fountain, a collection of nine new tracks to bewilder and entertain, prefaced by a PR blurb written by none other than the respectable Stewart Lee (he knows his stuff).

This new age mini-album is less focused on the raucous than its predecessor and flows like a straight-up post-rock record for a major chunk of its running time. From the looming tones of opener 'Mobius Strip' to the unsettling passage of time on second track 'Calypso 2', there appears to be a new limit placed on the band's ferocity.

'Holy Caves' appears to be a spacious stepping stone to the rocking tumble of 'Surrogate Head' which fails with guitars like the best of the instrumental soundscape builders (for example, And So I Watch You From Afar), before the delicate 'A Thousand Small Spaces' provides some welcome breathing space.

'Obidant' then shakes you violently from this dream in the most "like the old stuff" way possible, as you can almost hear the trio sweating with exertion as the layers of sonic wonder hit your ears. 'Impolex' and 'The Astral Wave' are reminiscent of the like of Battles as they ebb and flow with energy, building up mighty peaks of sound before swiftly deconstructing them.

As 'Mobius Strip II' ends proceedings in a subdued and sophisticated manner, you can't help but feel that this is "intelligent music". Painstakingly constructed layer upon layer to strike the perfect ambience, and telling this coherent but hidden narrative through the nine tracks, The Physics House Band are simply a wonder to behold.

Mercury Fountain is available from Amazon and iTunes. 

Comedian Stewart Lee writes the new bio for the part-jazz, part-prog, part-psych, part-tech-metal sounds of the Brighton trio as they announce their new record;

 “I’m nearly 50. I don’t know what’s going on anymore, I’ll admit. The internet’s availability of all sources ever simultaneously has destroyed my understanding of cultural development as a logical progression.  All music is time travel, forward and backward both at once, now.

But three years go my friend Simon Oakes, of prog-psych conceptualists Suns Of The Tundra, directed me to a YouTube clip of The Physics House Band. Impossibly youthful looking, and sounding like vintage seventies stadium-prog behemoth, but stripped of any errors of taste and judgment, fed amphetamines, made ashamed of their record collections, slapped in front of the whole school, immersed instead in post-rock procedure and practice, and made to apply their obvious talent and ability to a more worthwhile end than their forebears.

Three years on here’s their second record, a super-dense sci-fi mindfuck of a thing, music scholarship charity case keyboards in combat with squally spacerock guitars, dub boom bass and multi-time-sig clatter; a territory staked out over mushrooms at break-time, on the top floor of the multi-story car park, overlooking the ‘70s Bauhaus shopping centre concrete functional fountain square, but now gone all Escher in the aftermath, like a black and white architectural schematic drawing dipped in tie-dye.

Mercury Fountain doesn’t stop, a twenty nine minute surge of tracks that it would be a crime to split apart, the kind of part work The Physics House Band’s progenitors aimed at but never quite produce. It loads you into a water canon and shoots you out through its intermingled opening tracks, the group finally allowing you a pause for breath at the half way point, during 'A Thousand Small Spaces'; and then you’re kicked out of the airlock back into the Negative Zone again in 'Obidant', the laws of physics in reverse, Newton’s apples flying upwards past your grasping fists, your hair on end, arching to follow them, until you’re finally abandoned into the techtonic drift of 'Mobius Strip II'.

It’s a two black Americano experience that makes me wish I still had pin-sharp hearing to lose.”

 - Stewart Lee.

Brighton-based trio The Physics House Band are back with their boundary-breaking take on jazz-influenced psych-rock as they announce their first record in four years with new mini-album Mercury Fountain, due April 21st via Small Pond Records. It follows 2013’s EP Horizons/ Rapture, which sold out twice over on CD & vinyl.

The Physics House Band are Sam Organ (guitar/keys), Adam Hutchison (bass/keys) and Dave  Morgan (drums). The three met at university in Brighton, almost by accident, after the breakup of their previous bands, but the result couldn’t sound further from an accident. The Physics House Band posses a musical prowess way beyond their years, creating avant-garde compositions that capture everything from jazz to prog to psych to tech-metal to tech-rock. After playing shows with the likes of Alt-J, Jaga Jazzist, Django Django, 65daysofstatic, Three Trapped Tigers, and Mono , The Physics House Band are set to tour the UK this May, with more dates to be announced soon.

Listen to ‘Calypso’ here

See The Physics House Band live:

May

7th - Manchester, TBA

8th - Glasgow, The Hug and Pint

9th - Leeds, Brudenell Social Club

10th - Bristol, The Fleece

11th Brighton, The Haunt

12th London, Kamio