The acid folk genre is known for shapeshifting and being difficult to totally pin down, however, there are many artists out there who operate within this small niche who simply just retread the same paths that so many other artists before them had already fully explored. Yet, there are still a handful, like Blake Hornsby, who take the spirit of acid folk, and mutate it and find new routes to snake their way down, further evolving it into something daring and unpredictable. This is especially true on his latest album, Brugmansia.
The album starts on a sitar-kissed meditative note with bird sounds and busy fingerpicking, dreamy violin drones and chiming mystical percussion, before diverting into a nightmarish kaleidoscope of strange processed samples, backwards recordings and free-flowing, stream of consciousness-like verses. The album often feels like a delirious unfolding from reality, especially the hypnotic acoustic duo improv, “While Lying in a Field of Datura Stramonium,” with its intertwining leads twisting around a bed of looping reversed chants and Indian instrumentation. The atmosphere of this track, as well as much of the rest of the album, is so thick, mysterious and haunting, you feel as though you’re sinking into a deep sonic world that you can easily get lost within.
This is also especially true for the prismatic raga-like “Rishikesh,” with its ritualistic blend of sitar, flutes, cellos (provided by the great Helena Espvall of Espers) and electric guitar E-Bow (provided by the also great Buck Curran). The absolute flood of multilayered spiritual sounds that erupts by the end of this track is just about the most genuinely psychedelic aural experiences one could find on Bandcamp this year. The concluding piece that immediately follows this track, “Eaecanalos,” is an equally dense yet tranquil soundscape of nature sounds and mumbled voices, serving as a necessary come down from the transportive journey the record set your soul upon. This closing meditation returns the listener to the pastoral hush of the field recording collage that began the record, making it feel as though you have gone back through the gates of the album’s sonic universe, as it fades away behind you. When you come through the other side, you might find yourself a changed person (or at the very least, a changed listener).
Click here to get your copy on CD, cassette or digitally today.
-KH
