The album First by Tarotplane, originally released in 2015, is in many ways a 40-minute primer representing that entire house stuffed full of spacey drifting rock on gate folded vinyl. It’s a sampler of the many moods, textures, peaks, troughs and hallucinations… A guided exhilarating tour through all the strange constructions built all those years ago. The two side long tracks create two twisting suites of wholly engulfing journeys in sound.
For me, Side two’s Excursions 2 – Sacramental Circles & Liquid Dreams creates a wonderful blend of homage and reinvention, built out of a drifting bank of ambience. The guitar gently refracts in a mercury landscape before a long weird plane of processed dreamlike vocal samples and hyper dimensional electronics roll around the headphones. After an eternity in zero gravity, a guitar groove comes in over a strange, thrashing, dragging loop.
For a while, it seems the listener is locked into the weird whooshing sound of the motorway, deep in White Noises’ Electric Storm. Music that actually feels like time is warping, bubbling and pleasantly disorientating.
But the track doesn’t just tail off into ambient mist… The final section should come with some sort of warning. A buckled, dragging Faust groove bangs forward, tearing your brain open, morphing into a killer groove (Ame Sons Seven Time Key). Tarotplane works over the loop and unleashes an acid fried solo. The album closing in perhaps the most sensational of circumstances after a truly other-worldly extended build up.
Totally spectacular music.
First by Tarotplane is available here
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