Black Dirt Oak – Wawayanda Patent

MIE

Is Black Dirt Oak a supergroup? Perhaps. With members of Desert Heat, Violators, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Rhyton, Psychic Ills, D. Charles Speer‘s band and NNCK (that’s just from the more well-known groups too) it probably counts as one, if such a term really holds much meaning anymore. With seven musicians on board, it often sounds like there are yet more hard at work on creating as psychedelic an experience as they possibly can, from the opening sound of what could be mistaken for every primitive guitarist since Basho and John Fahey getting on down to jam, to the outer reaches of the drum-machine rippled “Demon Directive,” which shimmers and shimmies with an LSD funk from across the dope-smoked floor of a jazz club under the sea or high – very high – in the clouds, the saxophone puffing (or is that the singer?) and wheezing like there’s still plenty left to draw on, taking it from the bridge right down to the roach.

Add in some extremely stunned-sounding female vocals, the intricate interplay of banjos and guitars doing their level best to escape the Western orbit on a lolloping percussion groove and what soon becomes obvious is that – what with all the backmasked Easternish words and scales – Black Dirt Oak are on a trip to gods alone know where, probably without much of a route map beyond that which they scribbled on an Indian restaurant napkin (lemon-scented, naturally) after the munchies got too much and they really needed a banquet or two to revitalise them for the ascent towards inner space and/or until they achieved Nirvana, musically or otherwise.

That’s another way to look at this record – as the sort of album which inspires paragraph-long sentences with plenty of parenthetical observations, because that’s a bit what it’s like: a run-on continuation, a mulligatawny hotchpotch hotpot of cod-Raga groove, served up spread generously with effects and smeared across the tapeheads (metaphorically or otherwise) until the listener doesn’t know what decade it is. Did Amon Düül (I or II) really ever make that evening lounge album with Zakir Hussein or not, they might ask; and will chickawacka guitar slumber parties catch on with the kids this year, next week or when the electricity switches polarity (or maybe voltage) in the middle of a song? And just how far out can a crooning vocal go on a hip machine-beat limb exactly before the sun comes down and swallows the earth as a vast serpent devours its own coruscating psychedelic tail as the steel strings strum out its epitaph?

In other words, music to prompt the purplest of prose, if only because it’s got its eyes on several generational horizons at once, flinging folk-rock tropes out as often as the freak-folk ones while holding hard to the truth that there wasn’t just one musical time and place, but many. This is perhaps most evident in the persistently-recognisable strum, twang and plucks of Nathan Bowles‘ bristling banjo, an instrument which almost always says old time, but here he neglects – quite reasonably – to specify just when or where that might have been.

-Linus Tossio-.