Glossolalia: S/T
Prestidigitation (PRST005)
The American poet and spoken word artist Dan McGuire has been collaborating with the members of Danish-Swedish improvisational psych/space/kraut rock collective Øresund Space Collective before, but this time the band is responsible for all the music on the album. Dan and his friends have recorded spoken word and also some more instruments on top of the basic tracks resulting a deep, psychedelic and hypnotic whole. There are 15 musicians featured, all in all. The music is rather unusual for OSC since peaceful, meditative and Eastern, ethnic atmosphere is the main focus with one of the key elements being sitar played by K. G . Wesman (Sienna Root). The spacey synthesizers, organ, soaring electric guitars and groovy rhythm section are all there as well, of course. They don’t go for any harder rocking at any point and at times only light percussion is laying down the rhythm.
The album is started with the slow, hypnotic and excellent ”Meet Me at the River” where the sitar gets to shine through right away. The narration begins after a couple of minutes but ends soon returning just before the end in a more psychedelic style. ”Thaumaturgy” begins peacefully and in a very small-scale way when Dan whispers on top of sitar etc. The track grows a bit when the drum beat joins in but gets muffled again into cosmic spheres. The shorter “Midnight Mass” is a folk styled, quiet raga drone based on sitar, keyboards and percussion and has only little bit of poetry. The album’s longest track is the closer to nine-minute-long “One A.M.” that has again more of hazy, dark narration. The words on this track and the next one are by Charles Baudelaire. The going is slow and mesmerizing again and this is the track to induce trance in the listener. The little more energetic ”Glancing Back” includes interesting, somewhat jazzy rhythms as well as exciting electric guitar and slide work while the sitar is buried underneath. “Folklore” is a really hypnotic, mystical number with highly effective percussion and drums, excellent Oriental bass patterns and spellbinding guitar. Dan’s poetry also works out very well on this one and of course there are some space synths in there too. One of the best pieces on the CD. Finally we get to hear a rather formless track ”I’ll Show You Everything” that gets close to free jazz and also includes saxophone and some whistle. As a pure OSC album this might have formed a bit too meditative and tranquil whole but the input of Dan and his friends adds more dimensions to the music and makes it sound much more interesting. The album is a very pleasant, uplifting and psychedelic journey though inner space. And I definitely would like OSC to release more stuff with sitar on it.
www.facemop.com/glossolalia.html
25.10.10 by Dj Astro