In lockdown, the Chicago-based artist and composer Olivia Block began taking psychedelic mushrooms and listening with intent as a way to guide her composition. She used these sessions as both a music-making strategy and as a form of meditation on the pandemic: “The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron,” she said, describing the process as “an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound”.
However, the resulting album, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, is not obviously psychedelic, but a deeply immersive ocean of sound, with watery, enveloping drones that ripple with a liquid tremolo and create patterns behind the eyes. During the same period, Block was reading Anna Kavan’s strange and snowy postapocalyptic fairytale Ice, and it helped frame the album as a soundtrack to the unmade film of this eerie novella.
There’s possibly a whimsical link to be made here between mycelial networks – where fungi are connected to one another in underground systems – and the processing networks in synthesisers. More interesting is the way the layering of tones creates aural hallucinations, whereby an electronic tone conjures first singers, then a carillon of bells, making you do a double take as to its source material. It is music that anchors you – if my sea metaphor hasn’t gone too far – by encouraging you to picture what’s being played. Even without psychedelics the album has the power to produce vivid images in the mind’s eye when listened to at volume in a darkened room. It stands out among pandemic records because it is not escapist or cathartic, but looks to centre our psyches through listening.
Also out this month
Duval Timothy & Rosie Lowe’s gorgeous new album, Son, comes from a shared love of choral music, where voices coalesce naturally into an abstract sort of storytelling. In parts, it reminds me of the narrative textures of Solange’s A Seat at the Table; in others, it’s like an evensong concert in a family kitchen. The instrument-building half of Indonesian duo Senyawa, Wukir Suryadi, has released an album of rhythmic and percussive pieces. Menolak Tunduk is ritual industrial music, made from electronic hardware and his self-built instruments. Finally, dream a little dream of hills and valleys via the pleasing software synth landscapes of Osaka-based Futoshi Moriyama, on his new album Yūtai-ridatsu ± (Plus-minus).
This column’s regular author, John Lewis, is away
