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Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton, “The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now” (AD93, 2024)

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Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti).  While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique.  Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold.  In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).

This particular dream collaboration began exactly the same way as many other dream collaborations before it: Holy Tongue and Shackleton shared a bill at a festival and their mutual admiration led to plans to work together.  In this case, the original idea was for Shackleton to remix an existing Holy Tongue song, but the scope happily blossomed into something much more interesting: Magaletti, Mukai, and Al Wootton recorded a bunch of raw new Holy Tongue material, handed it off to Shackleton, and gave him free rein to go hog wild with it.  Speaking as someone who was absolutely mesmerized by Shackleton’s recent collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance, I can confidently say that “let Shackleton go absolutely bananas” tends to be a winning strategy and Tumbling Psychic Joy adds another instant classic to the pre-existing pile of supporting evidence.  

That said, it did take me a handful of listens to fully grasp the visionary depth of this album, as I was initially frustrated by the shapeshifting nature of the beats and grooves.  My early instinct was “these are just improvisations and jams that have been skillfully woven together,” as Tumbling Psychic Joy is bursting with great grooves and motifs that are never allowed to expand into a full song.  Literally every song has at least a few passages that absolutely rule, but they are all ephemeral and invariably morph into something different rather than lingering and expanding.

The most prominent example of that phenomenon is “Blessed and Bewildered,” as it deceptively opens with a swinging disco thump before Magaletti’s erratic and shapeshifting high-hat patterns quickly steer the groove into far wonkier and more serpentine terrain.  Along the way, the piece steadily accumulates subdued vibraphone melodies, smeared organ chords, warped trumpet skwonks, eerie flutes, wandering xylophone melodies, and burbling psychotropic weirdness en route to something that sounds like an improbably killer mash-up of Eva Luna-era Moonshake, Bitches Brew, and like four difference Stereolab songs filtered through Nurse With Wound-style surrealism.  Put more concisely, it is one hell of a chameleonic mindfuck and the only real constant holding it all together is Mukai’s deep, dubwise bass.  Notably, that piece is also something of a microcosm for the album as a whole, as Tumbling Psychic Joy feels like being led down a bottomless and deeply hallucinatory rabbit hole while guided only by a propulsive groove that itself is constantly transforming in character.  

Once I realized that, the ingenious construction of the album finally clicked for me and I stopped lamenting that my favorite moments did not stick around and started loving how beautifully and organically the endlessly morphing groove burrowed into fresh realms of psychotropic bliss without ever lingering in familiar or predictable terrain.  I was also struck by the sheer breadth of the various stylistic threads incorporated into Holy Tongue’s vision.  Naturally, a heavy influence from Jamaican dub runs through everything, but that bedrock is continually mutated by shades of everything from Can to space age bachelor pad music to noirish Lydia Lunch-style jazz.  For example, “The Merciful Lake” variously sounds like a field recording from a remote Tibetan temple, a sinuous contemporary espionage film soundtrack, and a very weird and proggy giallo soundtrack and it still finds room for a very cool and dubwise “spring reverb” interlude along the way.  Elsewhere, the closing “Gravity Will Fail Us” incorporates a welcome Les Baxter-style exotica influence and evokes something that alternately lands between “Vicki Bennett teams up with a reggaeton/dembow producer” and “Sam Shackleton gets a DJ gig at a tiki bar.”  

I could go into raptures about some of the wonderful individual sounds as well (trippy autoharp strums, loops that unpredictably slow, speed up, and pitch shift), but it makes more sense to just say that this whole fucking album is wonderfully immersive, deeply psychedelic, and vividly and vibrantly produced from start to finish.  Given how much I dig the previous work of everyone involved, it was virtually inevitable that The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now would delight me, but I was still taken aback by much this album shot past my highest expectations.  This is an absolutely stellar headphone album and easily one of the strongest releases in the discography of absolutely everyone involved.  

Listen here.

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Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance, “Jinxed By Being” (Drag City, 2024)

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This collaboration could not possibly have come at a better time, as Sam Shackleton has been riding quite a varied and adventurous hot streak over the last few years with his collaborations with Holy Tongue, Scotch Rolex, Waclaw Zimpel, and Siddhartha Belmannu. Given that Ben Chasny is also quite a creatively restless artist, Jinxed By Being could have gone in any number of possible directions, but the direction that the duo ultimately landed on sounds a hell of a lot like a Six Organs of Admittance album. The twist, however, is that it sounds like a truly great Six Organs album that I have been waiting for my whole life, as Chasny’s signature psychedelic folk vision blossoms into vivid psychotropic color with the addition of Shackleton’s panning and swirling electronic mindfuckery. Chasny and Shackleton have truly hit upon a magic formula here: usually a Six Organs album lives or dies based on the strength of Chasny’s songwriting or the quantity of killer guitar motifs, but Shackleton’s “heavy cosmic dread” aesthetic makes every song feel like I am being lured deeper and deeper into a phantasmagoric dreamscape.

The opening “The Voice and the Pulse” is currently one of the leading contenders for my favorite piece on the album, but it is more of a shapeshifting mind-melter than a structured song. While I am not usually a fan of Chasny’s falsetto vocals, the hushed, repeating refrain of “keep the corpse alive” makes the piece feel like a morbid nursery rhyme leading me into a reality-dissolving psychedelic fog that is as outre as anything by Current 93 or Legendary Pink Dots. Like most of the pieces on the album, the best parts tend to be the hallucinatory swirl of sounds in the periphery rather than the song itself, but the tribal-ambient percussion flourishes and the vibraphone-sounding melody that surface throughout the piece are sublime pleasures as well. The album’s next stunner follows soon after with “The Grip of the Flesh,” as Chasny’s chant-like vocals guide me into a shapeshifting phantasmagoria of kalimba melodies, layered field recordings, and gorgeously shivering chord strums. Then the bottom drops out and the piece unexpectedly transforms into a more pounding and doom-inspired second act that favorably calls to mind Chasny’s erstwhile labelmates Om (albeit only if Al Cisneros swapped out his bass for a formidable arsenal of electronics and effects pedals). More importantly, “The Grip of the Flesh” kicks off an unbroken run of killer pieces that stretches all the way to the end of the album.

The weakest link of that run of hits is probably “Stages of Capitulation,” which calls to mind an alternate universe Black Sabbath in which their primary influence was The Incredible String Band. To my ears, it never fully catches fire, but it nicely illustrates an important aspect of Jinxed By Being: every single piece features at least one wonderfully inspired passage at its heart. In the case of “Stages of Capitulation,” that passage takes the form of dueling guitar solos over a cool bass vamp, but most of the other pieces are more analogous to a celestial event: I start off thinking that I am destined to merely enjoy a solid Six Organs song, but then it is suddenly eclipsed by a psychedelic storm that dramatically transforms everything into an immersive, vividly realized mindfuck. That said, “The Sign of the Dove” also mostly falls on the more modest end of the transformation spectrum, as its chant-like desert rock delirium is enhanced by dub-inspired snares and shimmering chord swells before ultimately getting sucked into a roiling black hole of sizzling distortion.

The slow-burning and chant-like “Electrical Storm” is yet another hot contender for the strongest piece on the album, as it locks into a hypnotic gamelan-inspired percussion groove that gradually becomes consumed by rippling, panning, and darkly sizzling psychotropic magic (along with a very cool murmuring vocal loop). Remarkably, it somehow gets even better in its final minutes, as Chasny unveils an intricate guitar pattern as Shackleton goes completely bananas with his production flourishes for a crescendo that sounds like a descent into a psychotropic exotica cave. The closing “Spring Will Return ／ Oliver’s Letter” is yet another gamelan-inspired instant classic, as a killer dual-guitar hook winds its way through a shifting landscape of plinking piano, ghostly vibes, backwards guitars, and lysergically panning vocal afterimages.

I feel slightly crazy for saying this, but I genuinely think this might be my favorite Six Organs of Admittance album. My hesitation stems from the fact that Jinxed By Being is a bit of a bizarre outlier, as the reasons for its greatness lie outside the usual reasons that I enjoy Ben Chasny’s work (the occasional beautifully written song, the intricate acoustic guitar motifs, the fiery electric guitar shredding, etc.). Notably, my caveat with the other Six Organs album released this year (Time Is Glass) was that the songs were strong, but the no-frills, stripped-down nature of those recordings did not fully do them justice. On Jinxed By Being, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, as this is a collection of solid songs that have been transformed into something absolutely mesmerizing by their visionary arrangements and bold production flourishes. Sam Shackleton could not possibly be a more perfect foil for Chasny’s vision. I’m calling it now: Jinxed By Being is the headphone album of the year.

Listen here.