This is the third release from Californian naturalist psych label Inner Islands and it is from the solo project of label owner Braden McKenna himself, Wyld Wyzardz - chief propoent of the meditative Earth music his label personifies.
Three tracks of immersive oceanic flotation drone, all sun sparkles and fresh salty sea breeze. The twenty-minute opener Ocean Wind plays on a softly lilting motif that winds gently onwards like an ambulating river down towards the sea; three central themes, a deep undercurrent of thick tones, an almost birdsong like trebly refrain that calls from the tops of each wave of mid-toned synth thrum as it peaks. It sounds really clean and fresh, crystal clear waters swishing at the banks of a channel that drifts toward an increasingly open outlet and the expanse of the pacific. The second much shorter track, Forest Light, is beholden in thrall to the bird-song it samples, almost a pre-requisite for being released on the label, McKenna emphasies the subtly harmonic and rhythmic ways in which the accompaniment of nature can enhance the glowing energies of this nu-age synthesiser drone. There's the sense of a timeline being traced as the album progresses, the long slow dawn, through a hazy midday then a cooling down and darkening. The final track Dragon's Garden ends with the chirruping of crickets and the creak of frog song – dusk drawing in on the close of the album. Free Magic is out now available as download or 12" & d/l
Here is a joint post about two new deep and out there psych-folk releases on the recently formed label Inner Islands. Their first release was a Stag Hare / WYLD WYZRDZ split 7" last summer and now this lp and cassette make it three releases in total. The label's emphasis is "on a connection to nature and the inner journey", which is lushly manifest in these releases so far. Their release schedule for the year looks pretty tasty, and goes a little something like this:
Download releases from the label's BANDCAMP or order the physical copies from the WEBSITE
Are you ready to trip? Here we go.
Gkfoes Vjgoaf The Joy of Awakening
Last year's Light Weaving from the California-based Sean Conrad made number 18 in my top 50 of the year, so no surprise that my third eye lit up when The Joy of Awakening dropped into my inbox. A series of seven spontaneously recorded episodes riffing on different senses and peaks in the fluctuations of energy, this album sounds quite different to the tape of last year which was a more contemplative beast, slumbering gently, rousing slowly across it course. On Joyof Awakening there's a slightly more restless spirit at work, the album moves in a slightly more searching direction, less instinctively driven; as Conrad puts it the arc of this celestial voyage is like "being taken by an unseeable tribe of spirits that are trying to help you see the true nature of things", so it is perhaps symptomatic of both being led, and being led into the new. There's are still acres of beautiful space shimmering across the album, spiking into heavy rolling folk with rattling, chugging and chiming acoustic guitars pulling shapes out of the misty climbes, mostly backing up the surroundign tones with an earthy core, but on Samantha some full Appalachian picking takes the fore backed by twittering birds and rays of sun on the face. Elsewhere there is some wonderfully dense Animal Collective echoic vocal-loop harmonising buried within the sheets of vibrating drone, and across the whole thing, your passage is kept within the constant presence of a layering of fauna calling out from somewhere within the mix. Singularly the embodiment of the label's ethos, and possibly only from California.
River Spirit Dragon C45
The third release from the label is the debut album from River Spirit Dragon on cassette. It's a collaborative channeling from Stag Hare, Gkfoes Vjgoaf, and WYLD WYZRDZ. Fully improvised and recorded in thrall to the moment of time in which it was captured; Two tracks, taking up a side each of contemplative, slow moving, communicative, meditative percussive trance and long spacious loops of beautiful drone, always involving, evolving, building towards a renewed moment of communion, reaching one peak, grounding themselves within it then reaching up and out to the next, exploring with each other and expanding to within sight of that higher state these three astral navigators hope to achieve. The artwork is an fine indicator of where things are at here - glowing.
