Skyminds: Skyminds
Auasca

Soda Lite: Vale & Stone
Inner Islands

On Skyminds, Inner Islands proprietor Sean Conrad partners with Michael Henning for the duo's eponymous release, this set issued on the Auasca tape label rather than Conrad's own (both, incidentally, have issued material on Inner Islands, Conrad as Ashan and Channelers and Henning as Selaroda). Issued in a limited run of 100 pro-dubbed blue cassettes, the seven-track release was recorded in Berkeley and Oakland, California from 2014 through 2015.

Not surprisingly, there's a generous amount of blissout on offer, yet the two change things up in surprising ways, too. To illustrate, “An Opening” unfurls in slow-motion with extended synth drones assembling into a hot-wired electrical mass, but the restful ambiance is soon cast aside by the emergence of a forceful rhythmic element and a gradual swelling of intensity. Even more unexpected are the stylistic shifts that surface in the subsequent tracks, “Desert Winds,” a guitar- and harmonica-inflected sun-stroker coated in desert dust, and “Sunrise Trails the Growing Dawn,” an earthy folk instrumental replete with acoustic guitars, hand percussion, and, flute. In the tape's longest cut, “Morning Way,” hushed voices (chanting “feel today”), bells, drums, and limpid guitars conjure an eleven-minute mantra of zoned-out bliss.

If the recording isn't what one might have expected from Conrad, so much the better: there's nothing wrong with flouting expectations and keeping the fans guessing. And however much Skyminds plunges down unusual rabbit holes, the inclusion of the pulsating astral traveler “Farther Reaches,” piano-sprinkled dreamscape “Illuminated and Warming,” and calming reverie “The Tide's Caress” ensures there's enough synth-heavy entrancement on hand to satisfy the Inner Islands diehard. Skyminds indeed.

Complementary to the Auasca release is the latest from Inner Islands, which brings a surprise or two of its own. Soda Lite, we're told, “inhabits environments and responds through composition, attempting to relay liquid, sedimentary, and circadian lifeways to listeners elsewhere.” However obtuse that sounds, it's actually a fairly accurate take on what Alex Last is doing on Vale & Stone, his fifth full-length under the name.

By his own account, he starts a piece with a nature-based field recording and then adds a melody, drone, or motif using one of two early ‘90s keyboards; with that foundation in place, other elements are woven in, be it other keyboard sounds, recorder, flute, percussion, what have you. True to his word, the cassette's opener, “Vale & Stone,” begins with ocean sounds and twittering birds that are then joined by two overlapping keyboard parts, the disparate elements coming together synergistically and laying a base for other sounds. Compared to what follows, that title track is a tad reticent and unassuming; by comparison, “An Si Gaoithe” asserts itself with greater force, its warbly flutter intensified by echo.

July 2019