Zoharum (CD) / Sonic Meditations (LP/CS)
Originally released as mini CDrs on different labels in 2009, Expo 70‘s Justin Wright was joined for these two lengthy sessions by Matt Hill from Umberto on both bass guitar and at the drum machine controls. And what flights of psychedelic fantasy they are, drifting and floating on ever-flowing waves of looped guitar and recursive effect pedal washes that uncurl, largely in homage to Manuel Göttsching‘s E2E4.
The bass leads the way into the title track while the cascading echo FX tumble and ripple in seemingly every direction, Wright layering loops and real-time playing into an all-encompassing pot-pourri of guitar ambience. Dubwise delay trails flicker off the subtly applied rhythms, Hill’s bassline keeping steady with all the onward plodding surety of a four-legged steed setting out on a long journey. With the melodies wrapped up in feedback and recursing cyclically, it’s good to have something solid to keep the track on course as hypnosis awaits and the synaesthetic light show doubtless begins.
For a piece that starts all head-nodding and scintillatingly ambient, Hill ramps the dissonance up a few notches as the percussion takes the foreground, rhythm box kicks spattering and chuntering into chaotic patterns of multifaceted dimensions. The dynamic shifts that the duo undertake proceed to dissect, reflect and regurgitate the elements of the track further until it is possible to imagine some form of heat death of the universe is being explored in a micro / macrocosmic fashion. Which is exactly the sort of thing that space rock is meant to do, and “Mother Universe Has Birthed Her Last Cosmos” demonstrates perfectly why Wright deserves the reputation as an astral navigator he has developed over the last fifteen years, and fifty and more albums. “Ostara” is even further out on the trip, buzzing and gliding at the same time, coming up from the sparest of beginnings before peaking on the crest of the drone waves and taking the long, slow descent through gently prickling forests of delay. The reverb trails soon scoop up reality and drop it in tabulated shards of sound that seem to bounce into ever-increasing, then entropically dissolving, recurrent waves and a satisfyingly final bass guitar coda.The four tracks that made up Woolgather Visions and Mechanical Elements are brought together on the second disc of the CD edition and as bonus downloads for the vinyl and tape re-releases, having appeared on Gold Soundz as limited cassettes in 2009 and 2010 (as well as a CDr compilation of both sets in 2013).
“Tropical Trip Through Acid Clouds” has yet more of the Ashra influence to the fore, brightly chirruping notes sparking brightly at first, and there’s a mechanistic klang here too, one which underpins the rising drones. When the guitar scalds its way back to the top of the skyscraping treble infusions, Wright briefly lets his inner plank-spanker loose among the flickering delay, and it’s easy for a moment or ten to imagine him both crouched cross-legged over his instrument and standing astride a monumental speaker stack with a view over the contracting universe that the overall album title alludes to. But a sense of entropic decay sets in, the soaring plangentries are cut short and faded into meanders and byways of the background electronic hum. There’s more of this sort of thing on the charmingly un-hippyish “You And Your Dream Catcher Should Take A Hike”, the electrical vibrations rising strongly into an all-pervading cosmic whirl that bursts with swarming overtones and emergent helicoptering pulsations. The mood of harmonic-shifting stasis continues on “Neither Here Nor There (A Study)”, Wright constructing those proverbial cathedrals of sound from a familiar architectural palette that nevertheless allows him to build a glittering palatial confection. Everything glides sedately in dimensions that manifest both Göttsching and Popol Vuh‘s ways of approaching a new age of psychedelic music, while remaining resolutely Expo 70 to the core.-Linus Tossio-
