The Psychic Maps - 1st (Second) Lo-fi Record The Psychic Maps are a deliberately confusing entity helmed by Simon Maclaren (of Love’s Ugly Children, Sleepers Union and the Subliminals) over the last three and a bit years. You might call it a collective or a series of bands - and bands within bands. If you caught the P-Mapz in Dunedin over the last year, you might have seen Chris Heazlewood, Peter Gutteridge or Bob Cardy in the never-repeating stage line up, playing what you might refer to as 'the Dunedin sound' . If you caught them in 2012 you would have seen a three piece '90s' 'sonic-pop' style band based in Wellington. Earlier than that you might have seen them with luminaries such as Lucy Hunter (Opposite Sex) and Jeff Harford (Bored Games) in the band. And before that it mighta just been in somebody’s lounge with Geordie Frame and a set of broken bongos. No matter, the band actually does have an identity, its just hard to pin down, and all the better for it. The CD itself is a mixed-up grab-bag of lo-fi moments in time that have been arduously overdubbed or just plainly thrown together to create a listening experience in the 'Tall Dwarfs -Darcy Clay-Guided By Voices' bedroom bandroom sphere of things. A compilation made from four track, tape recorder and mini-disk field recordings, covering three years of genre shifts (DUB, KRAUT, pSYCH, folK etc) at 20 songs in 35 minutes, its a dense and exciting small thing in itself, and well worth checking out.