Crush Depth – A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony In Four Sides

Vitals

Album: Crush Depth
Artist: Spacefuzz
Release: March 7, 2025
Label: StupideIntelligente Phonographes
Format: Double LP (vinyl), digital, streaming
Genre: Progressive Rock / Dub / Electronic
Liner Notes: Jesse Jarnow
Concept: “An underwater adventure for the ear’s eye and the heart’s periscope.” — Jesse Jarnow, liner notes

Overture

In the grand tradition of submarine-based progressive rock concept albums comes Crush Depth — a collision of poly-polyphonies dub grooves, psychedelic rock, classical architecture, West African polyrhythms, and the experimental electronic tradition, all set within a four-sided symphonic journey. This submarine is orange.

The Long Version

Crush Depth – A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony In Four Sides began as a recovery — the record that came out of building something you could hold onto when very little else felt solid. It’s structured as a four-sided voyage: a descent, a pressure, a crushing point, an ascent. Each side of the double LP functions as its own movement, meant to be heard as a continuous dive rather than a shuffled playlist.

Musically, the album works in what Spacefuzz calls “counterpoints of counterpoints” — layered polyrhythmic structures built on a bedrock of dub, psychedelic rock, process music, prog, and ambient, threaded through with West African influence (Fela Kuti, Super Djata Band, Rail Band) and the motorik pulse of Kraftwerk and Neu!. But Crush Depth leans harder than any previous Spacefuzz record on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys — the album is dedicated to Wilson, and its contrapuntal vocal layering owes a direct debt to Pet Sounds and Smile. Of his composition teachers, it’s Terry Riley’s influence that runs deepest through this one.

Liner notes come from Jesse Jarnow — WFMU DJ, co-host of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. And Marty, Spacefuzz’s pug, isn’t just hanging around the studio for moral support: his improvised vocals are actually baked into the record, placing him in a long lineage of dogs barking their way into psychedelic music — Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and now both Spacefuzz vinyl releases.

Most of the record was tracked between 2021 and 2024 at The Blue Room in Phoenix, AZ — but two songs break that timeline in ways that are worth knowing. “Shot Through the Heart and Shot Through the Head” was recorded straight to DAT tape in North Hollywood, CA, back in 1999. It sat unheard for over two decades until it turned up in 2022 during a session archiving and restoring a box of DAT tapes from the late 1990s — a genuine artifact from a different era of the artist’s life, folded into a record otherwise built in the 2020s. The song is about a woman who grew up on a submarine, which made its rediscovery feel less like a coincidence than a submission — a song written decades before the album’s concept existed turned out to be its perfect epilogue, closing the record on the same metaphor that runs through everything before it. “The Unexplainable” took the opposite path: its vocals were recorded into a phone in Sleepyhouse’s laundry room in Petaluma, CA — lo-fi by necessity, kept because it worked. He was doing a load of delicates, btw.

Credits:
- Sleepyhouse – vocals, lyrics
- Maartijn Van Gunther – vocals
- H.M. Newton — cover art
- Jesse Jarnow — writer
- Mark Morgan — photography
- Todd Wills — set engineering
- Kelli Leslie — makeup artist
- Dave Cooley — mastering, Elysian Masters
- Phillip S. Rodriguez — vinyl lacquer cutting, Elysian Masters
- Gotta Groove Records — vinyl pressing, Cleveland, OH

Liner Notes

“All the World’s a Concept Album”
by Jesse Jarnow

Jesse Jarnow is a WFMU DJ, co-host of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America.

‘All the World’s a concept album’ William Shakespeare once wrote, or maybe it was Van Dyke Parks, but neither ever dreamed a night in Spacefuzz’s head, let alone a whole lifetime. The 4th or 7th or 10th album by the LA-to-Arizona underground music lifer (not counting extended discographies with the long-running FOOD and the still-active Kiss the Frog) Crush Depth sets an interconnected suite of personal revelation to a majestic, playful sweep.

One part aquatic dub, one part guitar adventure, one part Gary Panter weirdscape, one part dream transcription, one part Cornelius’s Point, one part bedroom epic, one part unaffected rawness reflecting on the blinkered grey float of disassociation through the lens of a life lived through a slowly moving submarine, one part post-lockdown catharsis, one part post-breakup reconstruction, one part post-reconstruction re-deconstruction, one part prism spitting out infinite other fractalized parts, Crush Depth‘s gotta lotta parts, man! So many parts! All of them moving, none exactly dominant. Songs gather and split into new formations, unknown sealife drifting through the foci of a submersible-mounted kaleidoscope.

A phase beyond the already way-beyond Increvable! (2023), Crush Depth navigates a rippling and barely-submerged world of real emotion with a veteran weirdo’s well-evolved (and never-fully-mastered) vocabulary and palette including (but hardly limited to) modular Moog zones, haunted radio broadcasts, folky storytelling, contributions from longtime pal/collaborator Sleepyhouse, theremin layers, interconnected groove sprockets, and sound carriers that remember (at all times) what the dormouse said.

“There’s a story here,” Jimmy Olsen once wrote, or maybe it was Jacques Cousteau, an underwater adventure for the ear’s eye and the heart’s periscope.

— Jesse Jarnow, 15 April 2024, Brooklyn, NY

Elsewhere

Read the full interview with Klemen Breznikar at It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, covering the pandemic origins of the record, the poly-polyphonies, Marty’s studio cameos, and why Spacefuzz builds vinyl artifacts instead of just releasing downloads:
Read the full interview →

Read the archived conversation with James Scarborough — originally published on his blog What the Butler Saw, preserved here after Typepad’s shutdown — covering the studio setup at The Blue Room, the Brian Wilson dedication, and the submarine metaphor’s roots in the pandemic and mental health:
Read the full conversation →

Track List

Side One

Crush Depth — 4:33
A Coloured Dream — 10:15
Canyons — 5:15

Side Two

Hello Bee — 7:59
Interrogate — 6:05
The Unexplainable — 7:22

Side Three

Surveillance — 18:41

Side Four

Deepwater Pursuit (Part 2) — 13:50
Shot Through the Heart and Shot Through the Head — 7:01

Total runtime: approximately 81 minutes.

“Deepwater Pursuit (Part 2)” is a quiet nod to Kiss the Frog’s track “Deepwater Pursuit,” from their 2018 album Versus the Monsters of the Seven Seas — a track whose sound world Charles felt was a kindred spirit to this one.

Listen / Buy

Buy vinyl on:
Bandcamp

“Hello Bee” world premiere video:

Also stream on:
Apple Music
Spotify
Qobuz
Tidal