GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:
Philip Gayle’s Sunrise Crazy is the kind of album that refuses to sit still long enough to be defined. It’s an unruly burst of creativity that bursts its seams with every eccentric idea it can muster—then calmly inserts a piano interlude or a mournful clarinet passage just when you think it’s only here to startle. And that tension—between the absurd and the beautiful—is what makes Sunrise Crazy so mesmerizing.
The first thing that grabs you is the voice—not in a singer-songwriter sense, but as a wild, interjectory organism stitched into the instrumental fabric. Gayle’s own vocal contributions are a collage of manic giggles, growls, cat meows, mutters, and bursts that feel less like lyrics and more like sonic punctuation. Fuuchan (who appears posthumously on much of the album and to whom the record is partially dedicated) adds her own haunting and childlike vocalizations that feel both innocent and unhinged, like a lullaby sung through the static of a broken toy radio. These interjections don’t sit on top of the music—they are the music.
Instrumentally, Gayle plays nearly everything: banjo, cello, acoustic guitar, mandolin, mouth harp, piano (in various states of disrepair, one assumes), recorder, toy piano, Taishogoto, and more. It feels like he’s ransacked a flea market and decided to compose with everything he found—at once. Each track is a carefully constructed chaos. One moment you’re caught in a looping free-jazz tantrum, the next you’re lulled into a cinematic soundscape with a sense of elegy. “Heartbeat Shakes The Flower – Setsunai Yuki,” for example, is a 10-minute closer drenched in sorrow, pairing piano and bass clarinet with a hushed gravity that stands in sharp contrast to the circus-like textures before it. It’s a staggering moment of release after the lunacy.
Comparisons have been drawn to Klimperei and the lo-fi surrealism of the Butthole Surfers, and they’re not wrong. There’s a collage-art spirit here—audio Dada. You’ll hear looped samples, spliced nonsense, saxophones squealing like insects, and yes, actual cats. (At least twice I looked around the room thinking my own had something to say.) But under all the noise, Sunrise Crazy carries an unmistakable emotional pulse. This isn’t randomness for its own sake—there’s a through-line of grief, love, and the absurdity of existing.
Public Eyesore remains a vital outlet for this kind of ungovernable experimentation, and Sunrise Crazy is a flagship of that ethos. It’s not easy listening, nor should it be. But it’s deeply human. Whether it’s processing loss through silliness or channeling joy through dissonance, Philip Gayle has crafted something that sticks—under your skin, in your head, and maybe in your dreams.
Recommended if you like: Smegma, Christophe Petchanatz/Klimperei, Family Vineyard, outsider freak-jazz, haunted music boxes, the sound of your thoughts turning feral.
Media: CD.
Visit Public Eyesore Records
Bandcamp URL: https://publiceyesore.bandcamp.com/album/sunrise-crazy
