CASUAL STRANGERS
“Pink Panther”
(self-released or Split/Pursuit depending on what’s real and what’s not)




Post-psych psych-psych super-psych excite bike from Austin, Tejas, land of the free, home of the psych, one star in a state of infinite madness, guns firing at the sky in a blaze of transcendental comeuppance, hammer falls on empty chamber, click, out. Last time we meted out justice in the wilderness we lost what made us Pink Floyd worshipers in the first place, replacing god-knows-what relic on an infinite loop, homemade locked grooves turning our 1970s-loving childhood into a dust storm of chronic ill-mental-health. Was it Animals? Wish You Were Here? Obscured By Clouds? We never took the pony out to the pasture, and we now know the results. That pony became pink and a panther, and we rode it into the cosmos that we can clearly see from the deep southwestern prairielands where Johnny Cactusseed planted tumbleweed. Get it? Tumbleweed. Noxious stuff, forgotten in a moment when the planetarium crush of visible stellar objects imposes itself upon actual eyeballs, and that’s not a roof of a building, that’s the real-deal holyfield, just asking for synthesizers and tripped-out guitars for background. Or more terrestrially, the sounds of pink splash into far-off lakes and hover, suspended, for observation, as if time has lost meaning. The letters of all the words have unraveled, and there is no human voice here, just the shimmering spell of a dimensional rift in miniature. Clandestine missions have sought an answer to these puzzling oscillations and rhythms but come up empty, or at least that’s what the men in black want you to believe. These are the men (and women) in pink, inhabiting wild compass points where latitude and longitude reverse, invert, and swirl before losing all bearing. Time shifts, guns return to holsters, cactuses hoard all the water from all the other life forms, pink becomes blue becomes brown, dust, green, grass, and where have we been, then? Was it a dream? Might we have uncovered the truth? Cosmic spaghetti! Cosmic jokers, more like it.



--Ryan Masteller