"Peter Kolovos, guitarist in Los Angeles trio Open City, presents here three tracks of electric guitar improvisations. In New Bodies, his first solo release, Kolovos lets rip with all the skronk and blurt he's been holding in for the last decade, in tiny, tightly gated segments.

His sound vocabulary is very broad, and his control of texture and timing is masterful. Using equalisation, reverb, envelope shaping and volume control... He rapidly opens and closes the volume window on a dizzying series of extended guitar techniques, creating the inescapable impression of Derek Bailey covering The Residents' Duck Stab.

If that won't sell records, I don't know what will.

This electrifying effect is enhanced by the crisp digital recording and the superb D&M pressing job - every clang and buzz is right up in your grill. The packaging continues the good work. The cover features a magnificent photograph of the guitarist taken by Joyce Campbell using the mid-19th century tin type process, which requires a sitting of over three minutes. The resulting image is as physically 'time based' as the recording it encloses, and has the distinctive look of a Victorian death mask - no 'posing' or even facial expression is possible. In this regard the cover is an exact metaphor of the recording - what you perceive is exactly what you get."

- Bruce Russell, The Wire August 2009

 

"One of my favorite records of last year... a glorious set of free-electronic guitar spray from open city / thin wrist’s peter kolovos, endlessly flitting from channel to channel, yearning for resolution yet steadfastly insisting on perpetual motion ... calling this a “bedroom guitar” session would be doing it a major disservice, as nothing here seems desultory ; each stray delay-line blast & pick-scrape lands with impeccable timing, lending a clear & concise “flow” to all recorded events ... on top of the alien-laned music, 
I really can’t picture a more well-done lp edition ; this thing just has “quality” written all over it, 
right on down the line from the silver-plate photograph on the cover to the bulky tip-on sleeve itself, accompanying insert, and 180g rachad becker cut
(seriously one of the loudest / ”beefiest” records i’ve heard in a while ; the dynamic range on this thing is staggering) ... this is how you do it folks!!!" 

- Mimaroglu, June 2010

 

"Was really excited to see the Thin Wrist label back in action, even more so when I saw that Bruce Russell of The Dead C was touting this as his album of 2009. This is an extremely fucked-up guitar side, at points it almost feels as if he’s either playing through some extremely gated F/X, making stabs at a volume pedal or editing his playing so precisely as to punch spilt second holes between one movement and then the next. The guitar is overdriven to the point of almost obliterating any notion of single notes but with a shot of delay that gives it a nice wobbly interstellar edge. The playing itself is massively a-formal, with the dexterity of Derek Bailey directed more towards Mars-style tonal confusion than usurped jazz modes, occasionally pushing it all the way into the kind of black-out feedback zones of Keiji Haino. But most of all it shares common ground with Donald Miller’s A Little Treatise On Morals, that same rigorous disassembling of guitar language and ferocious commitment to a barbarous modernism. Comes in very heavy sleeves on very heavy vinyl with a digital download coupon, mastered by Rashad Becker."

-David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue U.K. January 2010

 

"Peter Kolovos plays the guitar like John Wiese works a circuit board, his guitar squawking and scribbling out its beautiful spit and grit – its malfunction – all over the place. And New Bodies, New Bodies is the best album I missed last year. How good? Well, I would probably place it somewhere in my top 3 albums of 2009. Possibly number one. Which makes it an obvious mention for one of the best albums of this past decade. I understand that Kolovos’s experimental, hard glitching guitar work, 
like the spastic blues of Bill Orcutt (probably the other best album I missed from 2009), is a descendent of the all mighty Derek Bailey, 
but nothing from that man mangles me in quite the same way as New Bodies does. It’s as if, in his improvisations, in these obvious new tones, that 
Kolovos’s intuition knows perfectly the position and placement of each dotted note, each puncturing slice and every extended wall of garbage laced crunch. 
The album is, simply, perfect in its deconstruction, its balance, its weight and kill. 
Do not underestimate this. New Bodies is what a guitar was meant to sound like. It has simply taken all these hundreds of years to perfect it. Mind blowing."

- Thistle, Forest Gospel, July 2010

 

“Everything changes (or doesn't) at exactly the right time. With such abrupt cuts from sound to sound, a lesser man could end up with a whiff of "30 genres in 29 seconds" but here each new sound relates so well to what just came before it, in a gracefully aggressive way.”   

- Chris Corsano