Téléplasmiste – To Kiss Earth Goodbye

House Of Mythology

As their debut’s successor, Téléplasmiste‘s third album To Kiss Earth Goodbye tones down the spacey dronescaping, that Time Machines-like purr, of the previous LP in favour of a more transitional tingle where dancing structures free up the space, openly invite an otherness to come and play.

Recorded in Wiltshire and Somerset, I should imagine various ley-lined locations are flavouring these proceedings, the darkened apertures of old churches or neolithic long barrows seeping into the brew like slippery apparitions. Subtle hues that here reject all that black eye-liner gloom (you’d expect from the less attuned) to delve in an occultism that radiates the opposite.

The overlapping chime of variegated metal that calls to us on the album’s opener “Come! Vehicles Of Light” are indeed super bright, grab-bag your attention in scattering recoils spread over a gentle undulating glue and clattering couriers that suddenly explode to let in a host of mutating colour and curling warmth that just washes on over. A baptismal brilliance that portals nicely into the theremin thermals of “A Goodly Company”, carriers that eerily whistle through stuttering modulations, dart like the free-floating pearl fishers of the cover, channelled from the spirit world by 1930s medium Ethel Le Rossignol, a delicate delight braided in buoyant stabs of starlight, and the drifting waves of tangled hair.

Its feathery flotilla of electronics are re-purposed in “An Unexpected Visit” to be sent into a bubbling squid-like backdrop for a previously unheard trance narrative from ’60s pagan high priest Alex Sanders. It’s a track that’s inky with half-heard whisper, his laboured voice languidly poking out of the darkness in sighed disappointments and finally swallowed by a tidal push. Then the decorative distillations of “A Boy Called Conjurer” that trickle fairground-like, effectively pluck you out of the scrying stone of the previous to waltz around your head like a diode ballerina tied to this achingly beautiful unison of synth and woodwind that cascades like dabbled light that has the duo compositionally melting into each other.

A fertile synthesis that landscapes the otherworldly, breathes out a rarefied atmosphere that the Cyclobe-like gravitates of “Possessors Of The Orb” later celestially tattoo in a woven tapestry pushing you towards the ten-minute-plus centrepiece of the album, “To Kiss Earth Goodbye”. A lovely dronal homage to astral exploration full of silvery cobwebs and warping orbits and teetering transitionals that leave their mark, dig deep within your cortex, possess you with their particular poetry.

I’m really liking the glinting freshness of this release, even more than I did Frequency Is The New Ecstasy, and the downpour-soaked jewels of “Crescent” just underline that fact as its sequined sonics slosh around your ear, lamentfully pulling at the landscape surrounding it. Where the Téléplasmiste teleport will take us next is anybody’s guess, but for now you just can’t help but enjoy the ride.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-