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Released on September 7, 2015 via Argonauta Records
Shabda return from 2014’s Tummo with a trip up, down, around and beyond a Jodorowskian holy mountain of strange whispering drones and hallucinatory tones. Two 20-minute tracks constitute the release (meaning that surely they’ll be hoping for a vinyl reissue?), and these, ‘Pharmakon’ and ‘Pharmakos’, are complementary weird trips into cosmic ritual psych territory.
After 60 seconds of scratchy tapping beat, the first track bursts into a rich, organic, hovering, pulsing raft of leaves, reeds, and creepers, kept afloat by a deep resonant hum from a voice that sounds like it’s a quarter of the way towards turning into a tree. The press release recommends it to those familiar with Windhand, Terry Riley, Bong and Popol Vuh, and to me it’s the latter influence which is by far the strongest comparison. At least in the first two-thirds of the track, approaching the same kind of wondrous fascination with detail amidst the laidback far-out-ness that you’d expect from those German kosmische travellers. I can’t really hear any Windhand.. maybe they just like them? That’s not to say they aren’t afraid to bring the heavy tones though, and later on in the track there’s first an eruption of a searing lysergic guitar lead and then a more distorted electric assault, the initial jolt of a King Crimson jagged crunch eventually melting back into the kaleidoscope. That’s another example of Shabda’s skill at arranging different constitutent parts: a new element might stick out a bit at first, but before long it’s an indissociable part of the revolving ritual.
The flipside finds a creepier portal into transcendental drone mind, starting out with a low foundation note, around which the edges gradually begin to fray, getting more distorted and unpredictable. It’s like you can still see the central drone, but strange sonic figures dance around the edges, their thick crackling energy slowly encroaching more and more into the field of hearing-vision. All the while there’s some group chanting, though it’s unclear whether they’re conjuring up the interdimensional electricity slug or trying to keep it at bay. They eventually provoke a thumping, crashing rhythm marked by the splash of cymbals and some monotone monkish muttering. Other vocals that turn up halfway through seem a little incongruous at first, as if the hero of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds has accidentally fallen into a wormhole that dropped him unexpectedly into the end of the record. Happily though, he acclimatizes quickly and joins the mindless faithful in a rambling chant which seems to keep the wild squeaking voltage demon content enough.
While in some ways the ingredients are a fairly familiar Orientalist stew of exotic tinkling, grumbly chants and metallic zoinging, Shabda manage to levitate their way out of ordinariness through a real fine-tuned appreciation of how the different sounds go together. The compositional skill is noticeable at the beginning, where, rather than just noodling around waiting for the louder instruments to get going, there’s a careful crafting of an atmosphere out of small noises (this justifying their Popol Vuh comparison: a band whose attention to detail turned quiet, boring interludes into genuinely mind-expanding pastoral reveries). And this delicate touch isn’t lost either when they do go all out, as the controlled qualities of the curious distorted edges of sounds always maintain interest.
