Channelers: Entrance to the Next
Inner Islands

With his Channelers project, Sean Conrad, who also issues material under the Ashan alias when not overseeing his Oakland, California-based Inner Islands imprint, loosens the conscious reins to grant his intuitive self control. The process involved in the production of Channelers material is rooted in improvisation and surrendering to the creative will, regardless of the direction it wishes to pursue. It's certainly been a fertile outlet for Conrad: recorded in the fall of 2016 and issued in a cassette run of seventy-seven copies, Entrance to the Next is the eighth Channelers album since the project debuted in 2015.

Like much of his output, the material is fragile, gentle, and delicate, the forty-three-minute collection comprised of seven settings that blossom with an unforced naturalism; Conrad's own description of them as belonging “to some groundless, synthetic landscape floating in the clouds of a pink sky somewhere” proves apt.

Percussive rattles and willowy melodies well up from some imaginary forest in “Deep Time,” the title and sounds evoking a remote realm where calendrical concepts have no meaning; one pictures tribespeople, their souls unsullied by Western ways, gathering for a communal session of spirits-invoking music-making in this six-minute tone-setter. A similar image is conjured during “Passage” when dulcimer plucks commingle with flurries of wooden flutes, synthesizers, and hand percussion, their movements akin to the arc of birds swooping through the air in seeming slow motion. Conrad's deep connection to nature is evidenced not only by the character of the material but by track titles such as “Like Water Like Rock” and “Green Being.”

December 2018