HOLY MUSIC

John Morgan Newbern adopted the name MALACHI for the single album he recorded way back on August 17th, 1966 in Flower Child, San Francisco. His adopted name was taken from the Jewish prophet in the Hebrew Bible, and thus his sole album HOLY MUSIC is one of the very first truly psychedelic albums that was designed to evoke the spiritual, that is to melt the boundaries between the mundane and profound. What's notable about this release is that it is an example of early world music fusion that eschewed the pop world all together and created something that would satisfy the most blissed out sunshine child of the 60s looking for something beyond Jefferson Airplane.

This album is trippy in many ways. The music is not exactly rhythmic but yet is in a very distorted way. It is essentially John Newbern on acoustic guitars, which is what he plays most but also occasionally throws in some percussion and the rare vocals on the final track all the while weaving these sounds with Red Krayo on a jew's harp. This is music that is clearly inspired by their inner makings for it has taken me a while to warm up to this. There is something going on here that reels me in but musically it sounds as pointillistic as Karlheinz Stockhausen with mere impressions burrowing their way into our devolved dimension. The music has a depth to it that i cannot pinpoint and i have no idea why it seems to work on a certain level.

HOLY MUSIC has a simplistic approach that reminds me of other spiritual minimalistic types such as Tibetan Buddhist chants and although this gets cited as one of the very first psychedelic albums it is not really so for it doesn't convey any sense of the time and instead oozes a sense of timelessness like an eternal meditation designed to proffer the sublime to the unenlightened. Certainly an anomaly in the musical world and catches the spirit of some of the Krautrock and progressive electronic that was to come, but the album lacks any true bite for all the tracks sound musically similar and since every one of them is titled "Wednesday" with a different number attached it is not too surprising. This is a good album for zoning out or meditating to but don't expect any real grit to stimulate the active listening experience. I agree with Dr. Schluss' Garage Of Psychedelic Obscurities when he gives this album 3 out of 5 for quality and 4 out of 5 on the Trip-O-Meter, so i give it 3.5 but rounded down for PA