"Over the past year or so, Vorhex Angel has been dripping a mysterious brand of noise into America’s underground ecosystem. Live, they perform surrounded by a quilt of silver mylar blankets, a visual cue into the band’s rock mood, at once sharp and psychedelic. Not much has been revealed about Vorhex Angel in terms of intentions or influences. They have no social media presence.


Vorhex Angel features both members of JEFF The Brotherhood, a duo composed of Jake and Jamin Orrall founded all the way back in 2001, in Nashville, when both were teenagers. JEFF’s singular brand of heavy power pop led to a deal with Warner Brothers Records, but after they got dropped, the band’s musical interests became noisier, jazzier, more esoteric. After a point, a new name was needed.


Enter Vorhex Angel, a band started with longtime collaborator Kunal Prakash, a guitarist and in-demand session musician whose eclectic playing style draws from a deep, weird well. He has undertaken an electric guitar apprenticeship in Mali and studied Indian classical music while leaving footprints on stages and records with Quintron & Miss Pussycat, Silver Synthetic, Esther Rose, and of course JEFF. Prakash provides a perfect compliment and contrast to the unhinged guitar noise of self-taught Jake Orrall; together, their styles create an alchemical rock reaction.


In the span of a year, Vorhex Angel will have four releases on four labels. Sonically, they cover a range: There’s the damaged, and then there is the even more damaged. In one way or another, all of the music takes cues from a large trove of Japanese noise rock—Les Rallizes Dénudés, High Rise, White Heaven—and uses those influences as a jumping off point for improvisation. Is Vorhex Angel a jam band? Maybe if you swap out the Allman Brothers for Acid Mothers Temple.


What we do know: These are lifers fully off the leash, unburdened by the strictures of industry, making music as free as a seraphic being floating above a stack of amps in a dive bar." - John Chiaverina