Carlton Melton is: andy duvall – drums/gtr; clint golden – bass; rich millman – gtr/synth; and anthony taibi – synth/gtr.
special quests recording - Phil Becker , Phil Manley , John McBain , Brian McDougall
special quests Live - Phil Manley , John McBain , Isaiah Mitchell, Jack Monahan
( EPK available upon request - email meltonmusic@gmail.com )
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NorCal psych-kraut travelers-of-the-far-out Carlton Melton will release their new album, Reason Beings, on Sept. 18 through Agitated Records. It is the space-minded four-piece’s first outing in the three (terran) years since Turn to Earth (review here) and it brings four new tracks recorded live with synthesist/guitarist Anthony Taibi at the board at 3D Light in a town outside Eureka called Freshwater that they better keep a secret lest someone build a data center there.
All told, it’s a 42-minute meditation across four tracks — the premiering-below opener “Spirit Lens” (6:40), “Comes Fire” (14:07), “The Absence of Sensation” (11:58) and “Forever Room” (9:23) — and while it sounds like it was written to let them immerse as players as much as to immerse their listenership, the primary effect is hypnotic either way. Kraut-informed-but-without-the-pretentiousness-of-actual-krautrock, instrumental unless you count the humming guitars and synth in “Comes Fire” as singing, and given depth in the shape of its mix, it offers comfort and escapism in its procession, following a linear and definitively elsewhere-bound course.
They don’t have a chime or anything, but that first hi-hat hit at the start of “Spirit Lens” might be considered like a call to prayer for those who worship West Coast jam-psych. The guitar of Rich Millman carries a distinctively ethereal howl and the conversation with Taibi and the rhythmic underpinning from bassist Clint Golden and drummer Andy Duvall become like two simultaneous threads extracted from your consciousness, running in intersecting lines toward the center of the galaxy and, if you want, bringing you with them. Maybe this is a trip you’ve made before with Carlton Melton, but “Spirit Lens” offers invigorating shimmer and a mounting swell of noise, summarizing the album in a way but without giving up the entrancing repetition of the drums as it eventually will in “The Absence of Sensation.” The last minute finds them in a fleeting but full wash, with shred even in the comedown before “Comes Fire” takes hold to finish side A with its own extended throb.
Feedback is a major presence in the initial going, and as the otherwise-mellow drum pattern builds up beneath, the first several minutes see that feedback manipulated and pointedly not static as the groove begins in earnest. There are three stages to it that might be cordoned into noise, chug and shred, but they all fit together so smoothly I wouldn’t necessarily draw a hard border between them as movements. It’s more fluid than that. For those listening digitally (yo.), the transition into side B is heard more in the latter half of “The Absence of Sensation” than in the first, which has sounds like might be vocalizations run through effects or might be more guitar or synth, I honestly can’t tell (and I like that about it), but where the sense of drift comes more to the forefront and where in the last two-or-so minutes the drums drop out and the slow swirl seems to be let out of the airlock to float as it will.
This is revealed as a pivotal moment for Reason Beings after the shift into “Forever Room,” which may be shorter than “Comes Fire” or “The Absence of Sensation” but like the latter’s ending stretch is also drumless. As the guitar lightly churns in and lays out a series of drones and swells alongside the melody of the keyboard, Carlton Melton resolve earlier tensions not in quiet necessarily, but in a kind of liquefaction of the album’s movement. If the drums in “Spirit Lens” were pushing the song to create a vibe about as close to straightforward as the band here get, that emphasizes the letgo in the back end of “The Absence of Sensation” as all the more purposeful leading into “Forever Room,” which does have a build in the guitar and so caps the album in its most distant landscape. About 30 seconds of comedown later, the whole thing dissipates and all you’re left with, hopefully, is a day made better for having taken the time and the journey with them.
Carlton Melton will embark on a UK tour the week of release, and yeah, I know Sept. 18 is a long time away as relates to an album announcement made on the Summer Solstice, so I’m talking about songs you haven’t heard and probably won’t for a while. Not the first time that’s happened. But I take my chances to dig in where and when I can get them, and Reason Beings bends time anyway, so maybe you’re seeing this after the record’s already out. Hell, maybe you’re seeing it years later having followed a link back from their next record. All I know is I hope you check out the visualizer below and enjoy. Think of it as a starting point for the rest of the trip, since that’s exactly what they seem to have done. - JJ The Obelisk June 2026
Carlton Melton
Announced to celebrate summers solstice.. released on the Autumn equinox.. with a full UK tour to boot.. Come fly / fry with us…
Time to turn on and turn it up, theres a brand new Carlton Melton in the offing… its been a good couple of years since the West Coast space/sike travellers have dropped new music.
‘Phantomize beyond the window, into the portal, the panes of eternal returns, wooden spirals, roots into the realms of everything and nothing, the reason beings’
With Anthony Taibi fully ensconsed in the metaphorical Melton Dome, this four piece is ready to soar, go deeper and wider into the sike psyche than on previous recordings, now fully recording live with drums, bass, guitars and keys…recorded at 3D Light in Freshwater, CA by Anthony Tiabi in 2025, and mastered by the inimitable John McBain in 2026.
We have a single LP of 40+ minutes spanning 4 tracks, that have textures, and waves and patterns to lull you into some fever dream of motorik psych! Touchstones like Träd, Gräs Och Stenar / Kandodo / Guru Guru / Eno & Fripp / Birds of Maya / Parson Sound come into view.
There are moments of gentle ambience bordered by speaker shredding guitar soloing, whole passages of Krautrock inspired jams that have form and focus.. you blink and your live flashes before you, the record ends, you want more.. Carlton Melton masterfully blend hypnotic, long-form psychedelic jams with drone and Krautrock influences. - PR wire ( Agitated Records June 2026 )
CARLTON MELTON
REASON BEINGS
AGITATED RECORDS
RELEASE DATE: 18TH SEPTEMBER 2026 (LP/CD/DL)
Tracklist:
1. Spirit Lens
2. Comes Fire
3. The Absence Of Sensation
4. Forever Room
CARLTON MELTON SEPTEMBER 2026 UK TOUR
Sept 17 Hastings – Tough Love Records in-store album launch
Sept 18 London – Strongroom Bar, Other Side Fest – FRIDAY HEADLINER
Sept 19 Glastonbury – King Arthur w/ Deviant Amps and Sonic Trip Project
Sept 20 Brighton – Daltons
Sept 21 Swansea – Hangar 18
Sept 23 Northampton – The Lab w/ Xeeland
Sept 24 Liverpool – Lost Art Skate Shop w/ Requiem Blues and Xeeland
Sept 25 Todmorden – Golden Lion w/ The Cosmic Dead and Xeeland – Tickets
Sept 26 Todmorden – Golden Lion matinee 2-6 w/ special guest Dr Space and The Cosmic Dead and Xeeland – Tickets
Sept 27 Margate – Bar Nothing w/ Autohaus and Xeeland
Band:
Rich Millman – guitar/synth
Andy Duvall – drums/guitar
Clint Golden – bass
Anthony Taibi – synth/guitar
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Northern California psychedelic sorcerers Carlton Melton are brain surfers, mind trippers, ... “psychlists,” if you prefer. The band will take your head for a ride, occasionally rushing at superluminal speeds through a wormhole or gliding softly on a gentle breeze in a leafy glade. Sometimes your brain needs to rage, and sometimes it needs to repose.
For a decade and a half, the band has yo-yo’ed, almost schizophrenically, between these two modes: walloping space jams with furious guitar solos in one hemisphere of the brain and ethereal, feather-light splashdowns in the other. Not to mention a track here and there that builds from the latter into the former.
But with two new releases in 2023, the band has evolved. Whether psych rock or ambient trance, their sound remains driving, organic, and flowing. With the addition of Anthony Taibi (White Manna, DDT), however, the group’s metal freak-outs are Hawkwindier and their droning kraut trances are Spacemen 3-er. In January, the quartet released the playfully spacey Resemble Ensemble, recorded in Taibi’s home studio 3D Light. October now sees the band Turn To Earth, a work with scents of Autumn, a season of death and transition. The cover art evokes a vine- covered, electric crucifix. The sound is, well, earthy but also gritty and striving towards change. The album was recorded in Fall 2022 and now harvested in Fall 2023.
Phil Becker (Terry Gross, Pins Of Light) contributed drums and percussion to a few tracks on Turn To Earth, recording the album at El Studio in San Francisco. With Becker at the helm, the synths have become more prominent (“Cosmicity,” “Roboflow,” “Migration”) and the tone heavier on the doom (“Cloudstorming,” “Unlock The Land,” title track): several moments could even serve as background music for epic dark fantasy films like Conan the Barbarian, Fire and Ice, or Heavy Metal.
As exquisite as Turn To Earth is, Melton are best appreciated as a live act: their recordings as well as their gigs are largely improvised – not so much composed as birthed. And yet their most recent tour ended abruptly and perilously. The group had to cancel its final three shows once members were admitted to Arnhem hospital in the Netherlands. Five years later, reinforcements have strengthened the band and restocked its arsenal of great tracks.
After the rockus interruptus of that 2018 tour and the tantric tease of the intervening Covid lockdown, Melton have some unfinished business. An October 2023 tour is poised to set the freshly minted quartet back onto the stages of Europe and within the cerebral folds of its fans.
Turn To Earth, sure ... but keep your head in outer space.
eric bensel , Paris , August , 2023
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Carlton Melton, from Northern California, are now a practising fourpiece in the arts of melted-minds psychedelia.
With the added kraut-oomph and sike-flutter of fellow Californian Anthony Taibi (whom you may know as being a member of White Manna, and DDT with Andy), Rich Millman, Andy Duvall, and Clint Golden have now embellished the Carlton Melton sound.
Pushing forward as a fourpiece, the band recorded Resemble Ensemble in July 2021 (just before Andy moved back over East!) at Anthony’s home studio, 3D Light in Freshwater, CA. Anthony did all the recording and mixing. The Melton Magick Karpet settled, and our favourite contemporary sikedelic warlords plugged in, amped up and let it flow…and flow it does. From the krautrock fuelled pszych-raga of Prescribed Skies, to the fluid dronescape of Elsewhere that welcomes you into its arms with a warming tone, almost a missing Spacemen 3 demo at the feast here… So The Story Grows has the drone scraping through a murk of dazzling feedback and pummel, with the fuller sounding Melton giving the genre a proper wobble, hold on to your brains people…
High Alert… whas this? Synth and guitar interplay jambusting, this is the Melton wigging out and almost interweaving 70s high table rock with some odd and downright perverse synthfunkpunk rhythms… get weird… or get wired… or both… easily done here. Closing out the album with Route Thirteen is the road trip home…they’ve been, they’ve massaged and mangled your synapses, plug in the satnav and take the higher-route home…if you get our drift.
Carlton Melton, starting 2023 in a better place than most, soaring high on their synaptic-dazzling magick karpet.
( simon k December 2022 )
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Labor Day Weekend 2017,
A heatwave beat down on Point Arena, California gifting Mendocino County with one of the hottest weekends on record. Somewhere nestled in the wooded landscape of Redwoods that touch the clouds with ease sat a geodesic dome where psych rockers Carlton Melton created their hazy "dome rock". And on that oppressively hot Labor Day weekend Andy Duvall, Rich Millman, and Clint Golden said the hell with the heat and commenced to expand their minds and plug in, turn up, and freak-out.
Recorded after the band's mostly ambient Hidden Lights EP and a year before the next proper full-length Mind Minerals, the fellas got together for a smoldering Northern California jam session and to celebrate Andy's 50th rotation on the third rock from the sun. Letting the dome guide them where it may Carlton Melton did what they do best, get loud and expand their minds via buzzing guitars, slinky bass lines, tribal rhythms, and far out synths.
The results of that rock and roll heatwave can now be heard on Microwavelengths, a 5-track excursion into free form psych, hazy drones, and all out fuzz freakouts that sound as if Hendrix' Experience were hipped to Krautrock in some kind time/space conundrum before Krautrock was a thing.
Eschewing the studio sheen of their last few album releases, Microwavelengths is a gritty lo-fi record that locks into the band's early releases; set up a couple mics in the dome, make sure there's plenty of beer iced down, and hit record. Duvall, Millman, and Golden, along with help on the drums from Brian McDougall on a couple tracks, set controls for the heart of the sun. There's barn burners like "Lion's Roar" and "Alien Argument", while "Hazel Heat" finds the band in a calm pocket of contemplation.
Of course this wouldn't be a proper Carlton Melton sound excursion without one epic jam, which is here in the form of the nearly 20-minute journey "Microwavelength". A groove of epic proportions, the CM crew drive this dream machine from Point Arena to the far reaches of the galaxy and back on a single tank of gas. It's a hell of a trip, man.
We're coming up on nearly 15 years since the Melton came to fruition. The band has expanded their sound both sonically and aesthetically; starting out with these fuzzy, gauzy psych/stoner jams, then taking their sound from Super 8 to Widescreen Technicolor. With Microwavelengths we get a glimpse of the band from where they started, but with the advantage of time, age, and a few more rotations around the sun under their belts.
Plug in, turn up, and freak-out with Carlton Melton and Microwavelengths. That is, if you can stand the heat. -
J Hubner January 2022
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DOME ROCK.
Nestled deep in the forests of Mendocino County in Northern California, huddled under the protective shade of towering redwoods and within earshot of frothy waves crashing against the Pacific coastline, squats a geodesic dome that has served as crucible for the experimental genius of Carlton Melton. Nature and Man operate under different logics. But here, Carlton Melton wholly entrusts this idyllic environment with the task of inspiring and guiding their musical improvisations.
The Dome has been the ideal setting to facilitate their creativity. Without forcing a specific dynamic or theme, the band inhabits its womb-like confines to improvise, explore, dream. Their music draws on psychedelia, stoner metal, krautrock, and ambient atmospherics to convey, above all else, a mood.
A prickly guitar melody will float lazily, a wall of dissonant feedback will resolve into a hypnotic drone, or a colossal riff will exhume the soul of Jimi Hendrix. One hears Hawkwind or Spacemen 3 jamming with Pink Floyd at Pompeii.
Indeed, Carlton Melton have one foot in the ancient world and one tentacle in deep space. They are both the pack of proto-humans drumming with femurs in Kubrick’s 2001 and the film’s inscrutable monolith hinting at the universe’s mysteries. The “Stoned Ape” theory holds that early hominids ingested psychedelic mushrooms that provided an evolutionary boost to their brains, helping them blossom into Homo Sapiens. Imagine such cavemen trippin’ balls, their nightmarish visions sending them into feverish bouts of rage and then gentle moments of introspection. They very well could have heard the music of Carlton Melton rattling inside their skulls, first driving our ancestors mad then upward into a higher realm.
Andy Duvall (drums, guitar), Clint Golden (bass), and Rich Millman (guitar, synths) have yet to play Pompeii, but they have already wowed crowds at European festivals such as the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Roadburn, and Desertfest Antwerp. Live, they are jaw-dropping. On record, mind-altering.
In fact, with each album, Carlton Melton adds a subtle new element, synapses firing new neural connections. In 2020, they release new full-length Where This Leads, marking ten years of the band’s working relationship with their UK label Agitated Records and five years of recording with Phil Manley in his El Studio in San Francisco. With Where This Leads, the band rewires the listener’s mind. “Smoke Drip Revisited” is a ticklish acid flashback, “Porch Dreams” a dabbling in country psych, and “Closer” a driving, freak-out of guitar heroics.
One senses that the group is conveying a message that cannot be expressed verbally but only suggested through synth sighs, walloping rhythms, and soaring solos. Would Carlton Melton therefore be a group of stoned apes dizzily grasping for meaning or telepathic futurists communicating to us through crude man-made instrumentation?
Well, lower the stylus to find out.
Eric Bensel , Paris 2020