AYAHUASCA

Avant-psych-folk trip with hyper "abrasive" noisy buzzing drones. Less refined than the colourful and meditative "pearls from the river". However each composition includes lonesome sustained tones, incorporating screaming (raga like) violin parts, sitar and metallic echoing guitar chords. Ambient bowed strings album with top class psychedelic experimentations. It can easily attracts the attention of most adventurous prog listeners and fans of the "dream syndicate"

Into the black pool

Ayahuasca is the brew used by the Indian shamans in South America. While it's purpose traditionally is one of religious catharsis and enlightenment, it has been used by many travellers, trippers and seekers of truth or bewilderment by unconventional methods. I am no Indian, nor have I ever been lucky enough to frequent the lush rainforest where these peoples try their best to be one with the all encompassing greenery, but I must confess to having experimented with all sorts of mind-bending elixirs.

This album will probably take you the closest to the experience of the fever induced tripping of the sacred Indian liquid. It takes a lot of effort though - a lot of patience and will to submerse oneself into the murky darkness of the music and one's own bottomless brain-pit. It's like watching a Jackson Pollock painting - without start or end the haphazard splatters of colour explodes in all directions; a series of unprecedented energies and events that you're never going to fathom nor explain - they're there and that's it. Like life itself, a tree, a sidewalk with people passing by in an endless array of solemn faces, umbrellas and high heels clicking. Where do you turn in the great big mush of energy and events?

This may sound strange to some of you, but then again you just might be the ones searching for answers in places where there aren't any, merely presence and event. Transcribed into music, that's exactly what you get on this record. A big slice of primordial soup - a mountain of gelatinous mass that gels on by you like a strange encounter with a dream made up of fog and things you can't pick out. Sawing, droning modal guitar experiments dragging themselves forth with a sluggishness comparable to a stoned immaculate sea slug. Bowed metal sounds and intermittent tape effects that startle you in a hazy manner, like nearly awakening in your dream and then not really - as if your ninja lover is pouring thoughts of sand down your ear tunnel while you're setting sails on the black and blue oceans of Fantasia. Meditative slowly unfolding cello screeches emanating - frightening like horror movie gestures and highly vocal felines in the hours before dawn.

The thicket unveils at certain points as strummings of acoustic guitar suddenly emerge and re-enact musical familiarity. A folk note becomes present and colours turn into colours - definable sound that opens up the avantguarde canvas. The feel is that of ease - you've made it through the dark and are on your way into sunshine and reality, for then only to swoop back into the breach. It's a relentless journey spanning through 2 discs of some 2 hours and 10 minutes, where heads are tails and the other way around...simultaneous and then not really. Like I said, it takes a real effort, courage and patience to finish this trip.

This music is equal measures indistinguishable and enormous. It sounds like giant ferries of the mind docking in unseen places. There's no reference points, no melodies, no red line, no real sense of direction........yet it edges its way into your subconsciousness like a sonic botfly on the prowl - digging burrowing down into your head. If you blink the sensation eludes you - the feeling gets lost and the trip is over, but if you start out with closed eyes and with an open mind - ready for submersion into the black pool, then this will take you into strange beautiful places that are normally only saved for dream-catching spirit quests and people who seek them through holy liquids and the feathered shaman holding your hand.