One of the most highly anticipated albums of recent years - released today
Anyone got it yet and cares to report ?
BOOK OF SOULS: FOLIO A
Listeners have come to expect a lot from Secret Chiefs 3, and for “Book of Souls”, second in the band’s mega-trilogy (first being “Book of Horizons”, 2004), they expect nothing less than a vertigo-inducing follow up. True to expectation, "Book of Souls: Folio A" is a full-length album densely-packed with musical skyscrapers. Over a decade in the making along with Folio B, Book of Souls is Secret Chiefs 3’s most elaborate work yet. Following the 7-band schemata laid out in Book of Horizons, both Folios of Book of Souls thoroughly establish the depth of SC3’s journey into otherwise lost musical possibilities. With productions based in studios in the SF Bay Area, NY, LA, Seattle, UK and France over the last 11 years, the band’s leader Trey Spruance enlisted a small army of musicians-- or actually not so small, since the orchestral tasks demanded by the music seem effectively unlimited in number.
But familiar names in the SC3 canon form the backbone of the recording-band: Timb Harris, Ches Smith, Shahzad Ismaily, Anonymous 13, Danny Heifetz, William Winant, with live-band initiates Matt Lebofsky, Kenny Grohowski and Toby Driver adding extra life among the zillions of enlisted musical enablers.
“Book of Souls: Folio A” is evidence that Secret Chiefs 3 continues to operate in blissful ignorance of current musical fashions, remaining enchanted only by what can be unlocked in modern mediums by applying a specific recipe of ancient and a-linear processes.
The album represents the kind of titanic, almost Faustian undertaking that one would expect, something uniquely appropriate to Secret Chiefs 3. But for all that pomp it’s easy to forget that everything having to do with a SC3 recording is DIY to the core. “Book of Souls: Folio A” is a fully organic production. Everything is honed with love in one of the last-standing hermetically-sealed laboratories. Some may snort at the notion that there even could exist such a cauldron of limitless fascination extending so rigorously beyond the time/space boundaries of modern occidental groupthink; a place in-between, suspended, where the simplest motifs have the freedom either to radiate upward into geometric complexities that are beyond description, or to refine downward to a state of simple musical essence. But it's the usual thing at the SC3 lab.
This press-release is offered as a summons to the impartial jury of all earthly ears. All snorts and scoffs will be answered with a supra-sensory choir.
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