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Review: 'ETERNAL TAPESTRY'
'Wild Strawberries'   

-  Label: 'Thrill Jockey'
-  Genre: 'Ambient' -  Release Date: '23rd February 2015'

Our Rating:
No, this is not some super hippy dippy folk rock album but instead an album of chill out room songs to be played in the most drug-drenched alternative night club you can think of. The sort of music that will work at 4.30 to 5.30am when all the drugs you've spent the night taking are really making you freak a bit and you need to sit and chill but want the journey to continue as the club zombies dance and mutate in front of you.

The opener Mountain Primrose will help you stumble over the laid back and laid out clubbers as you find a sofa to sink into in time for the 15 minutes plus of Wild Strawberries to gently take you out into the hallucinatory world around you so you watch the swirling lights and follow the oil patterns floating around the room. Then, the forest late at night with visions of the woods around Portland, Oregon as the album was recorded in a cabin in the woods of the Zig Zag Valley. You'll sit there and journey off as your fellow clubbers disappear from your visions. The pulsating has begun in your mind and only the smoke floating through the air is holding your full attention as it floats above you.

We then enter the Enchanters Nightshade for a walk in the woods, sitting down to gaze at the stars through the branches and leaves, hearing the birds fluttering about and the crickets maybe even seeing a waterfall in the distance of your vision. It's almost raga-like: the slowest Tras Gras Och Stenar tunes etoliated sounds float through the room as the incense rises like the dew at dawn. Are those two girls next to you on the sofa slithering around like worms or is it just all the mushrooms getting to you? It's hard to say as 16 minutes seems like two hours' time is mutating as will your mind. Some old school head is impinging on your vibe telling you this music is so like the Mysteries Of The Yeti. Is it like volume one or two? I can't remember man! You nod to make him go away so you can drift off again. What are those crystallized movements in the trees?

Woodland Anemone is like a wake-up call or a space age alarm clock bleeping for just over a minute to shake you out of your reverie and make you have a drink in time for Maidenhead Spleenwort to take over with the first vocals. It features a chant that sort of becomes the repetitive "Bra bra Bra" sound on David Bowie's Diamond Dogs. It goes and the keyboards kick in and a whole new dark vista appears, sort of like Jim O'Rourke noodling with Thurston Moore on uppers twisting us even further out into this shaded forest.

Lace Fern ensures you'll be almost prolapsed on the floor after needing just one more toke before those worms can crawl all over your body as it sinks into the soft earth surrounding you while the green parakeets rise up from the branches around you. Are they calling to you as you shimmer and float for 10 minutes on this wave of undulation like the feathers and wings between the branches? Drifting among the ferns and feeling the early morning breeze.

What can you say about the Pale-Green Sedge? Well can you still talk or are you catatonic yet as those huge bass notes seep through your brain and the disdain at the idea of pale Green sedge disappears into the sofa, you're still crashed on dreaming about being able to move around, but this is chilled on the floor music like some kinda Koner experiment.

Is that a White Adder's Tongue dancing across the ceiling in the light show or am I just imagining it as the sirens of the forest call out to you, telling you it's almost over and you'll have to find your way back to reality once more? Still this 15 minutes will seem like a voyage of hours. The tongues are all around licking at you as the wind vibrates the branches and the crickets start chirrupping in your mind like gamelan percussion in the distance of the howling horror sounds, saying it's last orders and almost time to go staggering back into the daylight once more. Over and over again the repetition to make you leave the zone you have entered into with Eternal Tapestry.

This is an album for the sonic adventurers among you. Find out more at Thrill Jockey Records online
  author: simonovitch

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ETERNAL TAPESTRY - Wild Strawberries