After a handful of digital and cassette-only releases, this duo of Mkl Anderson (Drekka) & Adam Parks (lightning white bison) celebrate the project’s vinyl debut with their finest album to date. Coincidentally, it is also the duo’s first properly co-written/co-produced studio recording, as the project began its life as a long-distance collaboration. While the pair describe Water Is The Sun’s aesthetic as “an alchemical amalgam of their primary projects,” Ritual Fever feels like an entirely unique and inspired vision compared to their previous work, as they weave together the “devotional chants of West Coast cults and Appalachian hymns” with more experimental and drone-based sounds to land somewhere that blurs the lines between the haunted traditional music channelings of backwoods Americana Dead Can Dance and the more occult/psychotropic drone side of Coil.
Notably, Anderson and Parks intended Ritual Fever as “a fully realized work” that they planned to perform in its entirely during their live sets and that intent is very much reflected in its structure, as each side is essentially presented as a longform piece with a number of named sections that all blur into one another. Evidently the instrumentation was a mixture of “old tape machines, keyboards and field-/found-recordings,” but that “found recordings” part of that equation is doing a hell of a lot of the heavy lifting, as the central motif in many passages is usually a chanted or sung motif. While the character of those vocals can range from ghostly choral samples to droning ritualistic chants to rustic-sounding village choirs, the one unifying theme seems to be a sense of shimmering unreality and elusive meaning, as they are frequently buried deep in the mix and stretched, reversed, and looped in impressively hypnotic and psychotropic fashion.
While those hallucinatory vocal loops are often the melodic focus, much of the album’s structure is provided by minimal organ/synth/harmonium chord progressions along with an occasional stretch of slow-motion ritualistic percussion. In fact, I would describe Ritual Fever as an endlessly evolving balancing act between timeless, rustic, and haunted-sounding samples and alternately understated and epic-sounding synthesizer motifs, but there is also some wonderfully warped and gnarly sound processing in the mix as well. The overall impression is akin to listening to a slowly burning synth album haunted by strains of traditional music that sensuously drift in and out of focus (along with some occasional bits of heavy weather in the form of passing noise maelstroms or spacey sprays of laser-like synth sounds).
The cover art nails that vibe especially well, as there is a timeless beauty and innocence at the core of these pieces, but it also seems like those children may have inadvertently awakened a slumbering extra-dimensional horror lurking beneath the swaying wheat fields. Or perhaps the psychic residue of an idyllic imagined past has begun to bleed into the troubled dreams of the present. In any case, this is a pretty fucking mesmerizing headphone album and it seems to be tapped into the same “back to the land” zeitgeist as recent works by Weirs, Old Saw, and Pacific Walker (albeit definitely more on the “lost recordings of a doomed utopian commune” side of that spectrum).
