The duration of a piece of music often tells the listener a lot about the artist’s intention. Entire albums filled with a dozen perfect miniatures in barely 25 minutes, and others that blissfully drown us into compositions that last just short of 14 earth hours… How does time, or the perception of time, affect what a careful listener gets from tuning in?
Whilst we sometimes do enjoy concise music, it’s music that offers glimpses of the infinite, that often hits us the most powerfully. Longer tracks might sometimes feel like a way of filling a side of vinyl, or to better utilise the capacity of a CD, but with digital files, these physical constraints don’t matter. Things can be as long or short as they need to be.
For us, tracks that stray anything beyond 7 or 8 minutes encourage the listener get magnificently lost. Themes, textures, and whole events can transport you from a starting point you might barely remember, by the time you arrive at the other end of the adventure.
Hex, a recently released album by Massachusetts based artist – secret places of the lion, is a spectacular collection of 8 tracks, all at least 10 minutes long, that do just that.
The opener HEX spends an age lost in throbbing textures and wobbling guitar shimmers before somehow focussing into soaring transmissions, channelling super kosmic early Cluster. Suitably blissed out, CHARIOT slowly expands into waves of Hendrix jamming with some hypnogogic 80’s theme. The effect is of calming disorientation. It’s somehow pared back, and out of focus just enough, to be completely engrossing rather than cheesy and overblown.
SUNDAZED is all oily bouncy rhythms and a long droning intergalactic choir. STEEDS has, bizarrely, the hoofed patterning of a horse in some wonky dreamlike western film.
As Hex opens out as an album, the whole thing gradually snowballs into a throbbing mass of vague memories and fragments. Everything feels recognisable and growing out of normality, but spiked, and tripping into a never quite graspable fog.
PARADIN is yet another drift in zero gravity sunbeams whilst HYNPOS is the sound of everything so far, folding in on itself. Ominous scouring forms fizz and rupture through SHADOWBATH as things reach some sort of saturation point. ORPHEUS is a soft landing back into whatever space you’ve soared above for the proceeding 80 minutes…
Hex, ultimately opens out out like a zoned out version of Cameron Stallone’s Magic Lantern or Sun Araw projects. Somehow dusted in Angel Marcloid’s hyper realised sensibilities (she mastered the album), this music seems to delight in redrawing existing forms in surprisingly odd and uncharted new ways.
All of this gathered into a project named after a book by author George Hunter Williamson. His book, Secret Places of the Lion, first published in 1958, is full of theories about how earths religions have intermingled, and been influenced by beings from other worlds.
Quite how the artwork and track titles actually connect to the book perhaps aren’t that important to unlocking the joy of this music presented here. Somehow that assumption that, buried deep in these vast zones, some sort of narrative or logic is present, is enough.
Hex is an album that we’ve looped many times and despite the fact certain points do register powerfully in our memory, its ability to eventually lose you every time, is its inverted strength. Each of its 8 tracks all offer a generous slice of far bigger and loftier worlds, you just need a chunk of time on your most comfortable chair, to be acclimatised enough to enjoy the view…
A complex, layered and hugely worthwhile imagining of psychedelia in 2024.
Hex is out now, and is available digitally or as handmade 2CD set here
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