Braden McKenna's solo neo-nu-age psych-folk project Wyld Wyzrdz new album is the first of the year on his own Inner Islands label (even though I reviewed the Ashan album first) and the final one for him in this guise. It picks up where he left off with last September's From A Stone, reflecting on the theme of acceptance, as the title suggests, built on a collection of soft drones,
melodic hooks, vocal chants and moving percussion. Another heady tapestry of handbuilt sounds from McKenna's excellently expanding label.
Alongside this album comes a video titled ALL FIRE // ALL LIGHT directed by Lawrence Martinez, with its own website The Range of Light. It's an evocative twelve minute collage of 16mm and Super 8 shot landscapes, interspersed with illustrations and fx with a soundtrack from Inner Islands artists Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Stag Hare and Wyld Wyzrdz.
Sean 'Gkfoes Vjgoaf' Conrad's side project Ashan follows up last years single track Peace of Joy album with four long pieces of meditative acoustic trance. Ashan differs to the Gkfoes material in being less concerned with the physical realm, instead submitting itself to themes of love, peace, emotional tranquility and transcendence. The album is inspired by the book Ashan: The Gentle Way, a spiritual tome about "The vibration of creation, of harmony, of unification, and of love." No matter how cynically you want to view these themes, Conrad's embracing of this kind of flower power ideology is thoroughly sincere, as is the music he creates in thrall to it, and musically the resulting pieces probably work even better than the Gkfoes material because of it. The vocals in this album bestow it with a greater sense of wonder, Conrad's partner Rosa Beach-Mason and Braden McKenna contribute additional chanting and campfire lullaby madrigals to the tracks. You can imagine this being performed in a circle, the three performers locked into each others eyes and deeper, lost in an infinitely stretching moment of communion. There's a tangible resonance to the pieces that recalls Incredible String Band at their most spiritual, and these tracks sound like some of that band's finer, most elegantly concisely moments locked into spiralling patterns and repeated until trance state is achieved.
I don't really know who's making music of a similar style to this at the moment, maybe High Wolf at a push, but his is all tropical and steamy, this just goes for the soul and there's no one coming close to producing the effect that Conrad is capable of inducing. If you're in doubt as to what any of the above means, just get playing
the stream below and realise I'm saying it's far out amazing.
Sean Conrad is an exploratory sort of person. He is physically well travelled, having moved round the US and now residing in New Zealand, though his camp there is an equally nomadic one. His previous release as Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Glacial Ways found him take tentative steps towards the water's edge of a new sound - the element itself; Water. With titles that involve the words River, Mist, Clouds and Snow the main influence for Nature Eternal Striving is explicitly liquid and the album immediately starts with the gentle sway and rocking that echoes the waves and tides and continues to expound on the theme throughout. This new record comes with one of Sean's more insightful introductions which explains his disinterest in water and the fact he hasn't even been swimming for five years, then explains his realisation of it's importance to him and a new found connection to it. The music of Gkfoes has always been elementally obsessed, starting off with forest forays and campfire rounds ripened in the pine scented backwoods of his home state of California, albums strewn with birdsong and wind rustling leaves, tracks embellished with the sounds of the ambient nature around him. Now living in one of the wettest regions on Earth he has begun producing music that is in thrall to the rhythms and textures that make up seventy percent of the world's surface and the insides of our bodies.
On Nature Eternal Striving Sean has filled his sound out just that little bit much more and created his most cohesive and wholly consuming record to date. What he achieves is one of those masterly atmospheres that is not so easy to describe, yet so easy to sink into and be transported along with. Its apparent simplicity belies it's complex psychological effect and musical construction; a harmonising of alertness and deep slow breathing trance that will almost flat line your heart-rate with tracks like the 17 minute River Friends and closing Temple Of Snow. This is drone music with a lot of movement. There's a shimmering post-rock ambience to the way his use of repetition is pushed to subliminally affecting, physically arresting purposes, teasing out endlessly looping refrains of majestic beauty. This is new age trance music in the vein of White Rainbow's Prism Of Eternal Now without the ironic knowingness of what it's attempting, nor any of the crudity of someone like Dolphins Into The Future (though Ka Ala Ke Kua does convincingly refutes that).
In a harsh critical sense this could be viewed as practical, utility, flotation tank music, but that view would overlook the depth and sheer talent of the musicianship that enhance the album through the intangible elements of quiet euphoria that have always been there in his work. On ...Striving Sean has made these elements more pronounced whilst simultaneously immersing them into the body of the tracks with a more finessed subtlety that makes them much more consciously apparent, creating a coherent, transcendent, yet still elusive album that is always ahead of the listener, leading the mind into over-abundant landscapes of sonic fauna and flora.
Nature Eternal Striving is released on 12th August by Inner Islands and is available to order now. Comes on multicoloured 12" vinyl in a double gatefold sleeve, with digital download.
Here's the final track from the album; The Temple In Snow:
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.
Gkfoes Vjgoaf is Sean Conrad; a US based New Zealander who has been producing a kind of sunburned psychedelic folk of increasing detail over the last couple of years, slowly teasing and pulling at the strands of ideas and trains of thoughts until arriving at his current sound of slowly repeating cycles of sighing drone and shimmering ambient beauty. Like his previous albums there is an air of the retro about Light Weaving, of a distant psychedelia, but one that is resolutely of the now with it's submersion into a transcendental state of repetition and vibration. This is as much for the hypnagogic pop voyager as it is for fans of rough hewn folk. The kind of freaky fried sounds of Skip Spence and Rocky Erickson time-stretched to the current era of Peaking Lights, Amen Dunes, Lucky Dragons and a large pasrt of Finland's Fonal folk-drone roster; these bands all share a similar ramshackle texture and organicly happened upon feel as Conrad's work, but where an album like Imaginary Falcons had a close playful human intimacy, this communes with nature in a similarly tender fashion, until all passions are unleashed in the final track CelebrationInto The Light that layers up one of the most shapely and resonant riffs of the album into a post-rock crescendo of blinding magnititude, just as the title implies.
In his own words;
"Light Weaving is a way of imagining the universe. It is the oneness of all things and the constellations that we use to engage with the world. The music of Light Weaving is building things into nothing. Ebb and flow. These are autostereogram-like sounds for all seasons, unfocus your ears and take in what's really happening... Specifically though, it is a set of live instances recorded in my parents' living room and reorganized on tape in June 2010."
