(The Offside) Recorded in a tiny off-grid hut in the Cascade Mountains, fragmented clutchings of Northern California’s psychedelic home recording heritage can be found throughout The Solar Cell - intoned through home-made sequencers, synthesizers and a custom-built lap steel that conjures an Eastern drone resonance. Andy Puls’ long-running solo project has really crafted a distinctly unique vision incorporating a pop sensibility and outsider thingamajigs. Avant chamber folk and minimalist electronics have birthed a being that lives near a low-voltage carnival and its name is A Magic Whistle. Step right up! - Justin Clifford Rhody

(Disaster Amnesiac) It's not often that Public Eyesore Records does vinyl editions, but when they are involved in them, the consumer can rest assured that they will be beautifully produced physical objects, and The Solar Cell by A Magic Whistle proves this contention. This album, produced deep inside rural, mountainous northern California in the years 2021-24, contains sounds that worthily enhance its neat-o banana yellow vinyl and gorgeous cover art and photography. The timbres achieved by A Magic Whistle on Cell are generally bright and sunny. A sampling of some of the instrumentation: home made sequencers/synthesizers, modular synthesizers, electronic manipulations. These types of instruments and their sounds can generally be quite efficient for making those short, bubbling, burbling tones which give off feels of experiments in mycology eating; indeed as I've listened it's been quite easy to imagine them as being the soundtrack for some sort of film featuring fairies, gnomes, and maybe the odd cat, all shot with wide angled lenses and perhaps some "trippy" filtering. Partch-ian ratios appear to be utilized on Andy Puls's Cascadian Sympathetic Steel, a guitar-based invention which lends many stringed Exotica touches from its repetitive (in an entirely grand way) featuring on a number of tracks. Standout tunes for this listener have been the surreal Soft Robot and the tripped out county fair calliope of Dancehammer. That being said, the entirety of The Solar Cell's twenty one cuts are worthy of repeated listening. A Magic Whistle presents Rural Psych in a most refined and thoughtful sort on this split between his label and Public Eyesore. Hardcore vinyl heads: come for the package and stay for the music! - Mark Pino

(Felthat Reviews) A new and an excellent release by inexhaustible Public Eyesore on vinyl is an almost archetypical outburst of out-there outsider music. Recorded in a hand-made The Solar Cell in the Cascades, CA, USA wooden hut adds up to the magic of it. Self-made DIY instruments were a constant component of A Magic Whistle but unlike the releases before which oscillated around the modal of chamber music set across avant folk with electronic tools and everything that adds up to special way of composing and using those to convey the ideas. This time the environment itself and the location played an important role, if not the central one. Imagine Eastern ethnic psychedelia but set in the landscape of experimental music that is recorded outdoors. A sure and most self-confident hand of a composer that knows exactly what he wants to achieve and puts it into a multitude of quite short tracks set on this just-little-over 40 minutes. Beyond all this there is an honest realm of an intimate form of mysticism and something only a personal experience can tell you. Little daily insights, creating a form of inner landscape through music and everything else that can fall into the drawer you can always open and get yourself beautifully surprised. A gem of an album. - Hubert Heathertoes

(Vital Weekly) On LP, there’s music by Andy Puls, his fifth release, and the first to reach my shores. I understand he’s a creator of synthesisers and sequencers, plays the guitar and uses his voice, yet doesn’t use lyrics. His album features no less than 21 songs, many of which are concise and to the point; some even adopt a more sketch-like approach. There’s a pop-like sensibility here, especially when he plays his steel guitar, electric guitar and bass, such as in ‘The Joy Of’. Yet none of these songs become actual pop songs, as they remain short and mostly instrumental. If anything, I am strongly reminded of the 1980s cassette culture, when it also included home-tapers who wanted to experiment with song-like structures, using four-track machines to record such ditties. Puls plays some lively music, and it’s a joy to hear, even when it’s also something less fitting for these pages. Even with its more experimental edge, the music remains pleasant and somewhat quirky. Should I be the type to care about music as a soundtrack for sunny days, I am sure the 2025 seasonal soundtrack would certainly include this LP. - Frans de Waard

(Foxy Digitalis) The Solar Cell feels like it grew straight out of the forest floor. Andy Puls threads homemade electronics and acoustic fragments into a living system, with wordless vocals, stray guitar phrases, and the shimmering drone of Cascadian Sympathetic Steel moving like weather across a mountain ridge. There’s a grounded strangeness to it all, equal parts ritual and reverie. Recorded in an off-grid hut overlooking a creek, the album hums with the presence of its surroundings, not just as field recordings but as compositional logic. It’s folk music in the loosest, most generous sense, a song cycle tuned to trees, static, and solar light. Great cover art, too. - Brad Rose

(Lost In A Sea Of Sound) A Magic Whistle, a cryptoanalyst for the conscious? Melodic electronics riding bent sound waves from the Cascadian sympathetic steel guitar... these selections sink deep with joyful resonance. I am not sure if you have listened to Dan Del Santo, check out just a couple quick tracks from his White Feathers in the Coop lp... Frigidaire Song or title track White Feathers in the Coop. Different for sure from THE SOLAR CELL's track "Clouds in the Canyon" but there is a shared raw beauty. Something simple and true, a groove reaching back to afternoons on mountain side porches and the shadowy contrasts of the surrounding woods. A Magic Whistle has a bit more time for curation of sonic creation. Electronics coupled with steel strings are a cool thought and many of the selections on this composition let us hear how spectacular the creativity really is. The connections continue, "Snow Blown" sounding like a lost Residents song and "Bogus Burn" plays like Augustus Pablo found part of it. These connections lasting a few seconds before A Magic Whistle travels to new aural spaces. Sometimes the melodies seem to reflect eighties video games and then courtly serenades for cosmic gathering of benevolent energies. To be clear, Andy Puls crafts melodies with infinite inspirations, these sounds reach back through time and propel us with thoughtful grace. A pleasure to experience with each listen. And with twenty one selections on THE SOLAR CELL, this raft ride though the seldom sunlit canyon constantly turns, revealing new fascinations and deep thought. A Magic Whistle is the ongoing project of Andy Puls. Almost all of these songs were recorded in a mountain hut in California's very north part of the Cascades. All the instruments used are listed on A magic Whistle's bandcamp page. This release is an edition of three hundred yellow vinyl copies. Also a split release by Public Eyesore and Lampspeople Universal. The Public Eyesore bandcamp page has a good descriptive write up. Even more involved is Brad Rose's interview with Andy Puls on Foxy Digitalis. Really well done with excellent photos. - Ken Lower

(Babysue) The Solar Cell by A Magic Whistle (the band created by Andy Puls). Puls is an instrument inventor, multi-instrumentalist and composer. On this LP he presents twenty-one tracks the are purely inspired and unique. These recordings were made from 2021 to 2024, most created in a small hut (for which the album is titled) in the Cascade Mountains of Northernmost California. This beautifully packaged LP features cool simple cover graphics and was pressed on brilliant yellow vinyl. This one was obviously a labor of love. Remarkable and memorable in so many ways. - Don Seven