Portland protagonististas, Wooden Indian Burial Ground comprising, “justin, dan, sam, cory, paul sometimes too”, return with their latest instalment of “song’s about surfing on acid with your dad.”

Causa Sui, as with many other sonic splendours, found their way to me courtesy of John Westhaver – TBWNIAS’ scintillating skinsman, disc doyen and vinyl frontiersman at Birdman Sound.

As arbiters of taste go, you couldn’t wish to find yourself in better company.

‘Return To Sky’ is the latest magnum opus from the Danish four-piece, who’s collective El Paraiso Records Label, describes Causa Sui as, “abstract, instrumental sounds that owes as much to electric Miles Davis or Can as to american stoner-rock”.

photo by Clemens Mitscher

Sula Bassana returns from the hyper-spatial outer rim, bearing gifts of otherworldly electronic krautrock.

Continuing the trance explorations of 2010’s, ‘Kosmonauts’ space odyssey, this album envisages a marooned space mariner, whom fortune has smiled upon, bestowing ‘Shipwrecked’ as a soundtrack on infinite loop.

‘Moonbase Alpha Alpha’, conjures the epic sci-fi fave from my formative years, it’s tranquility base setting, ripped from earth orbit, so beginning a series of extraterrestrial adventures, jettisoning a predictable past, for parsec measured, motorik pastures new; ‘Shushi Express’, is an expressionistic event horizon, replete with hypnotic throat singing, a robotic, ‘Realm of the Nebulae’, galaxy quest; ‘No Time : No Eternity’, limbers up with a sense of foreboding, it’s deliberate syncopation, seeking universal truth and arcane knowledge…

photo by Samuel D. Quinn

I’m sitting here listening to Magic Shoppe‘s, ‘Interstellar Car Crash E.P.’ for the umpteenth time, with a big, shit-eating grin on my face,

It’s all I can do to remain sitting, such is the electrifying, soul shaking rapture.

Thank fuck for chance encounters via social media, the band followed me on Twitter after encountering ‘chromaticism’ on Hype Machine. “Connect the goddamn dots!”.

Magic Shoppe have me in an emotional knot, enlivened, impassioned, the whole 9 yards!

Life is good…

The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol, will need little in the way of introduction to regular readers of chromaticism.

For those of you who have somehow managed to slip through the cracks, or have been living in a cave, TBWNIAS – comprising, John Westhaver, Bill Guerrero, Nathaniel Hurlow, Jason Vaughan, Dave Reford, Miche Jette, and Jan Lis, are the undisputed ‘Masters of the Mole Hill’, formulating “8 years of pushing improvised psychedelia…to the masses.”