San Diego, California's folksy, psychedelic, ambient, Americana trio Maquiladora have self-recorded their new record for Darla. Many San Diegian friends gave support. Blackheart Procession members Pall Jenkins mixed the record and also played guitar and saw on two songs. Joe Plummer played drums and Toby Nathaniel played piano on one track. Even trumpet player J. Crane (Rocket From The Crypt) toots his horn here. Acid Mothers Temple folks Makoto Kawabata and Cotton Cassino added psychic nuances too. God bless The Flaming Lips, The Grifters, Tom Waits and especially the great big lonesome American southwest. You'll taste a bit of all in their rare brew. Check out their current record 'Ritual Of Hearts' (Better Looking) and their previous 'White Sands' (Lotus House). On tour of the Southwestern US to SXSW and back in March. They'll tour Japan with Makoto Kawabata in April. Look for a collaborative release with Maquiladora and Makoto on Acid Mother's Temple Records soon too. Check out the mp3 of "Dr. Said No" from their forthcoming CD. "The perfect soundtrack for trips into deep space, Maquiladora's Ritual of Hearts is folk music reared on NyQuil and too many viewings of Kubrick's 2001. These reclusive Californians do for country music what Radiohead did for Brit pop: dismantle the machine and rebuild it with alien parts. But for every washed-out guitar and analog synth, there is a warm piano or rural harmonica to bring you back to Earth. Pass the syrup." - Andrew Paine Bradbury, Black Book "Having previously been swept into a dreamlike state of narco-dependency with this astonishing trio's 1999 White Sands album, we're now left punch-drunk and staggering. The intersection of manic folk thrill and drunken psych on Ritual of Hearts - with piano, synth, melodica, mandolin and accordion darting like honeybees - proposes a craftsman's worldview that is deeply passionate. Maquiladora conjure diverse influences even as they dismantle preconceptions of (and recombines disparate bits of) contemporary alt-country, 60's folkadelia and the timeless, amorphous trappings of musique concrete. - Fred Mills, Magnet "Its as if they're inventing a new strain of Americana that has sucked out all the twang and replaced it with the expansion space of prog and psychedelia. While everyone else plies tired tales of whiskey and women, Maquiladora attempt to find new sonic and lyrical avenues for a music unwilling to shed its past." - Alternative Press (4 of 5 stars) "what we do, it's, you know, desert music. and that can encompass a lot of things: psychadelia, folk, rock, a sense of space, heat, disorientation, escape, release, sky, solitude, peace. the influence of whatever band is perhaps less important than the descent into anza-borego from the cuyamacas. or a day spent in yuma. going up the back road into julian. a shack out by cima with a world-band radio playing old 78s of ethnographic field recordings. is this helpful? - maquiladora