It seems like a completely obvious thing to say, but despite the vast selection of music available, it’s only ever possible to listen to one thing at a time. At any given moment in your listening life, you find yourself at one particular location in a galaxy of options.
If you like what you hear, you stay. You hit repeat and remember that this is something you want close to hand, to float or thrive in, or whatever it is that the music grants you.
Foreign Smokes has pretty much been the only thing we’ve played in days.
Whilst maybe it somehow isn’t the album we expected, its hazy psychedelic nature is a beautiful and blissful delight. Admittedly, we approached this debut release as BCMC release primarily as committed disciples of Cooper Crane’s Bitchin Bajas, but his spaciness beautifully dovetails into Bill MacKay’s twisting, almost fractal guitar.
What’s surprising is that whilst the album might have consisted of four fantastic 10-minute electronic drenched drones, but what we get is somehow much more sinuous, subtle, and engrossing. Here the overall strategy seems to be one that delights in continual twists and turns. Nothing just zones out into the horizon, but rather as odd ever evolving knots and eddies that convey Pink Floyd or The Dead in zero gravity mode. There is a touch of blues, jazzy inflections, spectral folk and even the shadows of Terry Riley…
Out of the vast ground covered in huge nebulous arcs, emerges a highly potent form of head nodding chill.
The whole album, is clearly a hugely thoughtful series of overlaps between two artists. The project’s name, the blending of forms on the sleeve and of course, the music all re-enforcing the idea that this a collaboration based on listening to each other, as much as playing. Saying more with less…
The opening and title track Foreign Smokes snakes around in the hum of organ and fragmented guitar before building into a gently shimmering mass. After another textural throb The Swarm opens up into a dreamy pulsing and patterning that’s hard not to view as some sort of access directly into a lysergic realm. Ripple in High Tide is a stoned meditation of light beams dancing over water. Sunset Saturn slowly pans out into a widescreen sense of vastness.
Whilst it would be easy to consider much here as almost ambient, what makes Foreign Smokes so immediately fascinating is that whilst it’s packed with absolute restraint – it’s actually a sprawling proggy symphony – but sanded and whittled away to its very essence. The interplay between guitar, synth and organ continually swap foreground and background, dark and light, stillness and animation, and what’s earth based and what absolutely soars.
Foreign Smokes is a slow burner that somehow also gets you there almost instantly…
Foreign Smokes is out now on Drag City.
Available on digital, cassette and vinyl here and here
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