Many groups of the turn of the millennium turned to the Incredible String Band for inspiration.
The New York-based Tower Recordings collective (Matt Valentine, Pat Gubler,
Helen Rush, Tim Barnes, Dean Roberts and many others) works with "pagan" folk
and psychedelic music. They released
Rehearsals For Roseland (Superlux, 1995),
The Fraternity of Moonwalkers (Audible Hiss, 1996),
Furniture Music For Evening Shuttles (Siltbreeze, 1998), which is
possibly their most inventive work,
and
Folk Scene (Communion, 2001), way too fragmented (22 songs).
Let The Cosmos Ring (spirit of Orr) was released under the moniker Planet TR.
Futuristic Folk (Child of Microtones, 1999),
I Burned One With God (Child of Microtones, 2000) and
Fantastic String Music (Child of Microtones, 2003)
were issued in only 99 copies.
Tonight One Night Only (Time-Lag)
Unfortunately, the vast majority of their recordings are mediocre at best and
overcrowded with filler. If they had consolidated their best compositions on
only one album, it would have been a masterpiece. As it stands, their
discography is a commercial sell-out of little artistic value.
P.G. Six is the more or less solo project of Pat Gubler, that pursues a kind of
progressive folk music akin to both
Incredible String Band's psychedelic folk and
John Fahey's raga-folk, although enhanced with both electronic and natural sounds.
Inaugurated with the adventurous single Book of Rayguns (Lux, 1995),
worthy of Glenn Branca's chamber music, P.G. Six
blossomed on Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites (Amish, 2001), with
majestically loose abstractions such as
The Divine Invasion, Unteleported Man,
The Shepherd,
Letter to Lilli St Cyr,
Quiet Fan for SK,
The Fallen Leaves that Jewel The Ground.
The Well of Memory (Amish, 2004) displays a more varied use of
instrumentation to embellish Gubler's eerie skeletal lullabies.
The six-minute instrumental Well Of Memory Part 1 sounds more similar to
atonal chamber music than to folk music.
Well Of Memory Part 2 is, instead, a concerto for droning strings.
These two experimental pieces are hardly related to the songs of the album.
After a lengthy guitar solo, Crooked Way finally materializes as a
pastoral lullaby, but the vocalist hardly makes an effort to be anything more
than a dreamier version of Donovan.
The flute-driven Three Stages of A Band sounds like a variation on
Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven.
The rest of the album are either brief fragments of music or arranged
traditionals. Not much to write about.
The Tower Recordings returned with
The Galaxies' Incredible Sensual Transmission Field (Communion, 2004).
The chaos of Folk Scene is used to more interesting purposes, not so
much to create snippets of music, but to animate and derail pieces that
are more organic and cohesive, such as Harvester.
Matt Valentine's solo Creek To Creation (2005) contains
the lengthy raga Ring Of Yod.
Ragas & Blues (Idea, 2005) is a collaboration between him and
Erika Elder.
Matt Valentine, Alex Nielson and Erika Elder recorded an album of
lengthy psychedelic jams,
Valentine/ Elder/ Nielson (Qbico, 2006).
MV & EE (Matt Valentine and Erika Elder) With The Bummer Road
(Mo' Jiggs, Sparrow Wildchild, Nemo Bidstrup, Tim Barnes and Samara Lubelski)
were documented only on CD-Rs such as
We Offer You Guru (Child Of Microtones, 2005)
before releasing
the double-LP The Mother Of Thousands (2006), half of which is devoted
to blues covers, Green Blues (Ecstatic Peace!, 2007),
and Gettin' Gone (Ecstatic Peace, 2007).
The all-instrumental
Music From The Sherman Box Series & Other Works (Amish, 2006) collects
P.G.Six/
Pat Gulber's chamber music in assorted configurations (mostly including his
harp), all of them originally
intended for a multimedia installation:
For Prepared Wire Strung Harp With Tremolo Pedal,
For Two Bray Harps, and especially the 12-minute
The Book Of Rayguns for six electric guitars, that was his debut
1995 single.
P.G.Six's
Slightly Sorry (Drag City, 2007), full of trite ballads and lacking even
the slightest ambition of originality, is an example of how trivial the
imitators of
Richard Thompson,
Fairport Convention,
Pentangle
and Incredible String Band
can sound compared with the originals.
Pat Gubler plays guitar, hurdy-gurdy, flute, electric piano, clavinet, organ, mellotron, bass. He and four others take turns at singing. Three friends provide
additional piano, guitar, bass and percussion.
On Drone Trailer (Dicristina Stair, 2009)
MV & EE conjured the ghost of the angry/psychedelic Neil Young with
the Golden Road: Doc Dunn (pedal steel, guitar, harmony), Mike Smith (bass, fender rhodes, harmony), and James Anderson (drums, engineer).
MV & EE opted again for a neurotic electric sound on
Barn Nova (Ecstatic Peace, 2009), but then foundered in the monotone
molasses of Space Homestead (2012).
P.G.Six injected a bit of life (and electrical instruments) into Starry Mind (2011), but the attitude was still too laid-back and unassuming to
change what was a rather monotonous trip.
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