tunes of negation: reach the endless sea

Shackleton works up a hypnotic group energy alongside avant-goddess Heather Leigh, percussionist Takumi Motokawa, and mallet player Raphael Meinhart in their debut as Tunes Of Negation for Shapednoise's label; Cosmo Rhythmatic. Reach The Endless Sea is a heady blast of lysergic, chromatic color, and syncopated rhythms that partly imagines an alternative musical timeline where the Hawkwind and Ash Ra Tempel fans, proto-Humanoid types, and new age travelers who made up the UK's rave vanguard prevailed against the law to enact a freely psychedelic dance music. The album follows in the vein of Shackleton's previous trio of vocal-focused trips for Honest Jon's and his Woe To The Septic Heart! label to find the mystic pied piper's spirit bolstered and tempered by a collaborative, multi-directional flow of energies. Gushing in five durational parts running between 10-15 minutes each -- or long enough to draw listeners into their dilated temporality -- the music comes in waves of pointed, timeless intensity, and illusory suggestion, subtly shifting pattern with an acid-dosed logic. Following her triumphant Throne LP in 2018, Heather Leigh provides sacral vocals to the canto couplet of "The World Is A Stage" and "Reach The Endless Sea", providing an elevated constant between its moiré of possessed vibes and lilting rhythms, before the trio of instrumentalists take the reins on a mazy trajectory between the harmonic lather of "Tundra Erotic", through the sanguine meditation of "Nowhere Ending Sky", and an epic, 15-minute invocation of ancient Indian raga traditions and mountaintop kosmiche in "Ruckschlag Rising Then Resonant", before they all come down together in the Amazonian delta flow and oozing sprawl of "The Time Has Come". While no single description will sum up the potency and conviction of Tunes Of Negation, their mission can be summed in a line from a poem by 13th C. mystic Jalalu'I-Din Rumi which inspired the album's title, stating that Reach The Endless Sea strives to "aid transmutation and enter into the light." Artwork by Zeke Clough. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Gatefold sleeve.