Herbcraft
Trash Heap
In the fall of 2012, Matt LaJoie began work on a set of lo-fi solo 4-track cassette home recordings that were intended to become Herbcraft's fourth album, 'Wot Oz'. As a bridge from the full-band Woodsist debut 'The Astral Body Electric', the songs and sketches of the Highland Ranch year represented a quickly and vastly shifting world of sonic inspiration: heavy Japanese psych, American free-jazz and proto-punk, and heady Velvet Underground bootlegs supplanted the flowing, folky, hippie-cult jams of yore. Several songs and sketches from this era were demoed and scrapped before the band's trio lineup solidified around drummer/producer Aaron Neveu and bassist/organist Joe Lindsey in summer 2013 to record 'Wot Oz' proper. Meanwhile, the 4-track cassette masters and crudely mixed 2-track bounce tapes from Highland Ranch were trucked from home to home in more than a dozen moves since 2013, eventually becoming lost in a mislabeled box for a couple years before finally being found in March. Now digitally transferred, remastered, and finished where left incomplete seven years ago, this previously apocryphal book of the Herbcraft story is being shared for the first time.