Rag Lore - Sabah el Mitragyna Reveries

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Almost 60 minutes of purely American primtive lapsteel guitar magic from Matthew Boteilho, who’s about to make a big move to Cairo, Egypt from Houston, TX. Lengthy, healthy improvisations where the shamanic string licks meet eternal drones and psychedelic atmospherics to fill your head with cascading aural orgasms that just keep coming and coming. Available on cassette from Space Slave and on CD from Dying For Bad Music. And also in digital form, completely free from Bandcamp. Highly recommended.

Review: Ashan - Ancient Forever

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(Cassette, Inner Islands, 2013)

Sean Conrad has been exploring his way through different shades of psychedelic folk over quite a few years now, first starting the adventure with wonderfully randomly-named Gkfoes Vjgoaf, going through a number of different projects, currently stopping at Ashan. There is a certain New Age ideology connected with all music of Sean Conrad, and that of the Inner Islands record label, with the short description of “Ancient Forever” being “exploring the deep energies of the Earth”, among other pursuits.

The music of Ashan often sounds psychedelic, but there are no implications of drug use or any invites to use them - in other words, Sean Conrad might be a beardo but he’s no weirdo. Instead of running into strange, trippy collages or improvisations he opts for clarity and crystal quality of his music, made with simplest instrumentarium around (mostly acoustic guitar and wordless female vocals, moaning and humming away). Conrad takes the peaceful, folky tunes and transform them into looping, enthralling tapestries, stimulating the imagination and filling the air with kind spirits. Harmony with nature is the key here; leaving the civilization and embracing the wilder side is the key.

Both Sean Conrad and the Inner Islands label reject the (anti)social media (i.e. Twitter or Facebook) - sure, there are websites, but they function just as a tool of prividing some basic information and a mean of purchasing the albums. But they really don’t give a shit how many “likes” or “followers” they have. They decide not to waste their time trying to build a “fanbase” or whatever it’s called in the social media technobabble these days. Instead, they just make music that makes them (and the listeners) happy and re-discover what many people lost, surrounded by gadgets and hi-tech machinery. They go out, to explore the wilderness and gain happiness from it. We should probably follow them - the summer is coming, after all!

Naomi Chomsky - Iron Bird Meditation

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Man, I could’ve been driving past this beatnik’s house last summer when I was in the UK. The provocatively named Naomi Chomsky may be coming from London or its whereabouts (I don’t really care), but his music is way beyong the urban congestion and urban leanings of that city. Instead, we get an exhausting, sun-gazing psychedelic ruminations that bring the brilliant beings of Alan Watts or Sandy Bull to mind, lulling you into a trancelike state with motorik guitar semi-improvisations and trippy minimalism. It comes from England, it sounds like a lost gem from the late 50’s/early 60’s Cascadian/Californian forest, recorded in lo-fi conditions with a healthy aid of the then still legal LSD-25 or a nice dose of psilocybin mushrooms, back when nobody has heard of terms like “psychedelic” or “trippy”. Primal and authentic, Recommended.

We Are the Wooden Houses - Murrain Pica Mast

A 30 minute long jam broken into two 15-minute pieces from the Cumbrian wilderness (that’s in the north of the United Kingdom, for the less geo-savvy readers) based label Treehouse Orchestra Recordings. The first track is a sitar-tinged, Easterny psychedelic folk jam which picks up the pace with some cleverly sampled and looped live drums for a full-on psychedelic freak out (well, maybe not that amplified, but still very trippy!). The second track is steeped in angelic, krautrock-influenced guitar ambience that spreads into infinity - think Manuel Gottsching and his modern-day equivalent Mark McGuire and you’re pretty much spot-on. You can also buy the cassette if you like - it’s got some beautiful packaging!

Download via Mediafire

Mortal Mountain Band - Mortal Mountain Band

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Listening to Mortal Mountain Band is like going to some high mountains: you never know how the weather will surprise you. Same with MMB: you never know what to expect musically, what moods might be hiding just around the corner. It wears the clothes of a lo-fi psych folk record (down to the artwork and the group’s name), but it’s not afraid into a psychedelic kaleidoscope of sounds and ideas. Sometimes it hits the moments of dark ambience, other times it’s just the good ol’ bucolic and carefree acoustic guitar noodling - while those moments prevail (often equipped with vocals to a greatly ballad-like effect), there is often a hint of something more primeval and non-human lingering under the folky exterior with its lo-fi field recordings having something of a legacy of Stunned Records. A loose collection of guitar beauties with a trippier twist between the smart melodies.

Review: Caligine - Anomia Mediterranea

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(CD-R, A Beard of Snails, 2012)

Freak folk was never dead for the Italian freak folkers Caligine. Or maybe rather good ol’ psychedelic folk, before it became the domain of music journalists and critics trying to push it as just another another bandwagon-jumpin’, hype-creatin’ music trend squeezed between one genre and another somewhere toward the end of the previous decade. The psychedelic folk is alive and kicking, even if it exists way below the radar of the tastemaking moguls, now replaced by some other style of aesthetic, only to be exploited, milked out and left to rot. Caligine just don’t give a flying fuck about trends and keep on doing their thing, and to a great effect.

A Beard of Snails, the label that releases “Anomia Mediterranea”, describes the album as an “absolute tour de force”. And of course, a record label desciribing the album they’re releasing with anything else than a glaring praise would be nothing short a suicidal, they’re pretty damn right with this one. Caligine are known to fuse the new with the old, and the catchy with the more experimental. And so, the opening “Καλύπτειν” starts with what appears to be a traditional folk song in Greek that fades away, to be replaced with healthily feedbacked electric guitar drones and a mysterious tapestry of overlapping, whispering voices. This is just the intro, though. The next songs show that Caligine are took much inspiration from the American Primitivists, both old and new - there are echoes of Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho and Ben Chasny almost everywhere on the album, from the beautiful musical poem “La Grande Ferita del Cuore č Questa Esistenza”   or the fingerpicking raga “Cani di Paglia Divorano Tigri di Cartapesta” complete with deep Eastern drones rolling gently in the background. The album tends to descend into some weirder areas, occasionally bordering on noise music, with overblown, harsh drones and noise rock guitar explorations, like the closing “丹田”, which starts with echoing classsical music samples only to be replaced by a menacing black cloud of guitar feedback and reverb, which kinda sounds like a Fushitsusha jam without bass or drums, only the screeching strings remaining.

But apart from the occasional harshness or sound experiments, the new Caligine offering is a thoroughly beautiful and beatific affirmation of folk music ideals, a series of musical paintings with great semi-whispered, semi-spoken narrations in Italian and a stellar acoustic guitar technique, heartfelt and sensible. So if you’re into psychedelic folk and you believe that psych folk/freak folk is NOT dead, get it immediately. You won’t be disappointed.

Sungod - Crash Galactic

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Back when I posted Sungod’s “First Matter” on the Blogger based Weed Temple, it was an album filled to the brim with white hot, mind-melting stoner/space rock jams very much in the Hawkwind school of thought. “Crash Galactic”, the 2012 release by the same band, doesn’t rock as much, this time going for a more mind-expanding approach, doing less freakout jams and more droning nirvana sessions. It’s partially psych folk, partially New Age, partially kosmische musik and partially psychedelic rock free jam, but all in all it’s a 70+ minute long spectacle of cosmic powers and great, great music for trips of all kind (including the sober inner-self meditational trips). Recommended!

Better Psychics - Better Psychics

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Don’t be scared away by the excess of weirdness in the songs that begin “Better Psychics”. The self-titled cassette by Brattleboro, VT freak folkers Better Psychics (which consists of Zach Phillips and Chris Weisman) is really a nice collection of heartfelt folk/pop songs, it’s just served in a somewhat dadaistically fucked up way sometimes, throwing angular synth noises or ambient snippets out of the blue or just drowning the pieces in tape hiss or “studio” talk (hard to talk about any studio here, considering the very lo-fi and DIY nature of the tape). Challenging, but rewarding. See through the mess to see the beauty. The cassette can be bought from OSR Records, but you can also download it for free to get a taste.

Better Psychics - “Better Psychics”

Review: Ashley Paul - Line the Clouds

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(Vinyl LP, Rel Records, 2013)

“Line the Clouds”, the newest release by the Providence based composer Ashley Paul is an album of contradictions that clash and irritate at first, but later find their way into the listener’s ear and begin to fit perfectly. First such clash comes in the opening piece “Soak the Ocean”, where the lullabish vocals and a soft, peaceful melody sound jarringly out of place among the screeching, metallic, atonal sounds that belong more to a dryly academic elecroacoustic improvisation suite than an oneiric folk album. But is it really a folk album, after all? The listener would like to believe so, but Ashley Paul deconstructs the psychedelic folk cliches through droning, unsettling compositions that are more guaranteed to send shivers down one’s spine than wash them in the beatific beauty.

Through sparse, almost totally random sounds and skeletal track structures she builds an intensely intimate, emotional atmosphere. It feel almost intrusive to listen to this album built on fragile vocals and shyly played instruments, as if one was listening to something reserved to the creator only, invading the personal space of the musician. Just like the cover, the music on “Line the Clouds” often feels crude and unfinished - and this is exactly where its strength lies. It leaves much space for interpretation and for the sounds to sink in, allowing for reflection. And that reflection allows the music to hit the listener harder. The droning, whining clarinet. The few basic plucks on guitar strings. The occasional bells. The ear-piercing reeds. Everything has its time and place, every piece of machinery knows its role perfectly well, even if it feels random in focus. Ashley Paul plays God, and has a lot of fun with it. The tracks jump from stuttering, free improv vignettes in the vein of early Supersilent (without the virulent synths) or AMM to fractured, deformed proto-songs which evoke the ghosts of American folklore.

It’s also worth ot mention contributors to the album, especially the New York City based improvisational shaman Eli Keszler, who made a lot buzz through his releases on PAN label. Together with Paul, they both work up some great chemistry, pushing raw, restrained sounds forward toward a very demanding, yet very rewarding end. “Line the Clouds” may, and most likely will, require some preparation and repeated listens. But once the listener gets it, it feels like opening a vault of new meanings and emotions.

Review: Datashock - Live.Love.Data$

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(Cassette, Eiderdown Records, 2013)

Is the title of the newest cassette by the German grusekraut collective Datashock an obvious reference to the album by the NYC rapper A$AP Rocky? Yes, it is.

Are there any similarities between that album and the Eiderdown cassette? No, there aren’t. Well, actually, if someone would look real hard, they would probably draw a connection between the band’s calmer moments and the ambient-infused work of producer Clams Casino, but let’s not get that far. If there are any parallels that can be drawn between A$AP Rocky and Datashock, it is their mutual love for the sweet leaf (and while the Germans never explicitly mention it anywhere, their music speaks for themselves).

Let’s stay with the cold, hard facts: Datashock, similaringly to their psychedelic Japanese forefathers Acid Mothers Temple, like to refer to other/more known artists and albums in their own albums. They both embrace the atmosphere of freedom and don’t prefer to limit themselves to a tight, closely-knit rules of what constitues a musical composition or a song. Recorded while making the stellar “Pyramiden von Gießen” LP, the two lengthy tracks hit the similar vibe of hippie commune abandon and drugged out freedom that should be the staple of every freewheeling psychedelic collecitve.

The first few opening minutes of “Into the Abyss” is almost ambient: a drumless, somewhat melancholic and slowly unfolding vista with faraway synth notes and droning, ritualstic vocals and an electric guitar that is just barely there, only to remind the listener of its existence with shyly played notes. The break comes around the 8th minute mark, with the bass kicking in to lock a groove, the electric guitar that provides sparse, yet crucial blasts and some drums to finally provide a sense of rhythm. From that moment on, the jam gains power and gets more amplified, to get to the stonery, fuzzy end much in the vein of the electric-guitar oriented Kraftwerk on their one of a kind “Bremen K4 Radio” live recording.

Side B’s “Noch ein bisschen Erbs” also begins slowly, but in a more liquidy, almost aquatic way, with the gentle guitar tremolo and the bubbling synths sounding like a meeting point of Super Minerals and Bee Mask. Wordless vocals also reign here, with a disembodied whine or wail once in a while and the rough violin occasionally emerging, like a sound that lost its way in a Velvet Underground jam and went all the way to the Datashock jam. This one also gets faster and more dynamic on the way, with the drums kicking in and the electric guitar getting more presence (finally!), but without getting to the rocking gem. Instead, the second piece is slightly more meditative and desert-friendly, like a Barn Owl piece that decided to grow some balls and rock out a lil’ more.

Long.Live.Data$!