#30: Mountain of Fruit and Flowers
The Lost Proto New Age of Jade Warrior / 90s Ambient Techno & Trance
Welcome back, dear readers/jammers. So stoked about all the new subs this past month. We must be doing something right over here! Looking forward to a soggy but wonderful weekend in the Hudson Valley with Phish at Bethel Woods on Friday and Sunday and the essential Deep In the Valley festival in Red Hook on Saturday. If you’re out there, say hi!
The Trailhead 142
This week’s episode of the Trailhead started off with stunning new (more or less) solo guitar music from Los Angeles’ Barry Archie Johnson and Australia’s D.C Cross. The former’s new LP—Fortune’s Mirror—is coming out on VDSQ in October and hits every sweet spot acoustic guitar-centered music can hit. Glorious!
We also heard absolutely lovely new electronic works from James Bernard (Quiet Details) and Purple Decades (Beacon Sound) before getting into some modern bedroom psychedelia from Fruk29 (Not Not Fun) and the UK’s Thought Leadership.
The first set resolved in rhythm with a beast of a jam from LA’s Total Blue and an outstanding new track from new-to-me Pacific Northwest electronic artist tondiue, who’s forthcoming Kelp Roots LP Word to the Centipede promises to be a percussive, jungly, ambient techno delight.
We took a bit of a turn in the second half by featuring some rare psych that has recently been reissued by the great Spanish label Guerssen. From that fine reissue house we heard German band Grave and Texas’ Cold Sun, who have some deep connections to the 13th Floor Elevators. I also dug up some of my favorite 80s psychedelia and played a cut off Crystalized Movements’ first LP ‘Mind Disaster’. If you know, you know, if you don’t, you should do some digging on this band and guitarist Wayne Rogers’ many other projects—all essential for true heads. We played a long jam off Oneida’s latest as well as the fresh single from the new group The Hard Quartet, featuring Stephen Malkmus and Matt Sweeney. My favorite piece from the psych set is from Minnesota group Cassini. They’ve just released their debut long player and it’s a righteously fuzzed and scuzzed trip that recalls Hawkwind and the like. It’s outstanding!
There’s more music than I can mention in the new episode so dig in and let me know what you’re loving.
LISTEN TO TRAILHEAD 142 HERE
Playlist:
1. Barry Archie Johnson - Glass hand - Fortune's Mirror (VDSQ,2024) 00:00
2. D.C Cross - The Nepean - Glookies Guit. (Self, 2024) 05:08
3. James Bernard - Act of Gratitude - Only Now (Quiet Details, 2024) 09:54
4. Purple Decades - Completely Still - Fraction of Centuries (Beacon Sound, 2024) 16:48
5. Seawind of Battery - Supernatural - East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper (WarHen, 2024) 21:28
6. Thought Leadership - XIX - Ace of Swords (Darkly Inclined Tapes, 2024) 26:29
7. Frunk29 - Vaho - Drifting Horses (Not Not Fun, 2024) 34:35
8. tondiue - Chickadee - Word to the Centipede (Kelp Roots, 2024) 39:17
9. Total Blue - Heart of the World - Total Blue (Music From Memory, 2024) 45:30
10. Oneida - Gunboats - Expensive Air (Joyful Noise, 2024) 1:07:17
11. The Hard Quartet - Earth Hater - Single (Matador, 2024) 1:15:19
12. Cassini - Cassini - The Cassini Promise (Self, 2024) 1:17:32
13. Crystalized Movements - Psychotical Delusions - Mind Disaster (Twisted Village, 1983) 1:27:15
14. Grave - The Hunter - Nr. 1 (Guerssen, 1975/2024) 1:36:20
15. Cold Sun - Ra-Ma - Dark Shadows (Guerssen, 1970/2024) 1:44:23
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The Beauty of Jade Warrior’s Island Years
It was definitely a case of listening to the erroneous groupthink of shaggy, crusty, rock-worshipping elders that kept me from exploring Jade Warrior sooner than this year. I mean, it’s understandable when their non-Vertigo LPs littered every dollar bin in finer used record stores for the last 40 years. Between their omnipresence and the naysayers, I kept my distance.
Idiotic.
I have to credit Omaha’s Dereck Higgins for getting me to finally check this British progressive act out this year. It was in one of his daily videos on YouTube that he mentioned the band and how they were exploring a really cool, singular musical space without ever getting 100 percent there.
Thanks to Hudson Valley Vinyl, I was able to pick up three of their mid-period albums on Island for next to nothing: 1974’s Floating World, 1975’s Waves, and 1976’s Kites. This is 75 percent of their Island Records output with 1978’s Way of the Sun completing the picture. I’ve yet to fully dive into that one but it’s on my dollar-bin crawling radar. All four albums were collected in a 4-Disc set on Esoteric Recordings last year called Wind Borne - The Island Albums 1974-1978.
The band started their journey in 1970 on the legendary Vertigo imprint, issuing four records via the highly collectible psych/prog label. I’ve yet to go in on those records so we’ll have to come back to them in the future. I’m not sure about the other ones, but copies of the first pressing of their debut are spendy, so that won’t be anytime soon.
Anyway, thanks to the championing of Steve Winwood, Jade Warrior (at that point reduced to the duo of Jon Field and Tony Duhig) went to Island and started to create these beautiful albums full of space, folk, rhythmic force, and hallucinogenic edges. There is a good amount of attempts at traditional Japanese folk sounds, textures and melodies and these are pretty much the weakest parts of each of the three albums I’ve hung out with. The best parts are the ones with Western instrumental prominence—the jazzy chords, spacious synthetic swells and acoustic guitar weaves. There’s bountiful and bouncy flute all over the place. I appreciate their appreciation for the ancient Eastern sounds but they just don’t mesh with the band’s strengths.
A lot of Jade Warrior’s Island years come close to terrain that Oregon were exploring. The big difference between the groups is that Jade Warrior still had to get heavy sometimes whereas Ralph Towner & Co. seem like they never heard a rock band ever. The dips backwards into riffy rock aren’t bad per se but seem misplaced and disrupt the meditational flow. Both bands benefit from amazing recording and engineering and stock US pressings. My three JW LPs were cheap and have serious soundstage width and depth and almost no noise. Thinking about it, I don’t know that I own a bad US Island of anything. But maybe that’s just because Traffic and John MArtyn are basically my favorite artists of all time.
Anyway, start with Floating World and, if you’re feeling it, continue through the mid-70s on Jade Warrior’s beautiful, if circuitous, trip to the heart of the mind/soul/body.
Phish - Tweezer, Chaifetz Arena, St. Louis, MO, 7/30/24
Sorry, I’m not sorry about more ranting and raving about Phish’s best tour in at least a decade. So far, it’s been a run of epic proportions. Each night showing a reinvigorated quartet with the deepest songbook in modern music, breathing fresh air into old vehicles and powering new vessels with patient, melodic and textural energy.
On July 30th at a small-ish arena in St. Louis, the band took Tweezer out for a ride through the cosmos. Clocking in at over 40 minutes, it’s a shapeshifting juggernaut full of intense interplay and communication.
No, long Phish jams aren’t always amazing but they present unparalleled opportunity for excellence. An improvisation that takes its time to find new spaces and investigate multiple parallel realities and universes can do what no 3-minute song can do. So, without investigation, a 40-minute piece is absolutely more likely to be more rewarding than something a quarter of its length. It’s just the nature of spotaneous composition. Now, maybe that’s not what you go to Phish for. Ok, that’s weird but fine. I’m into this band for what they haven’t done yet and every night of their Summer tour has been a gift.
The Tweezer from 7/30/24 will likely enter and stay in my personal Top 10 for the tune that made its debut in the early spring of 1990. A tune that melted away easily for group interplay and exploration, Tweezer has been one of the band’s most trusted and used springboards for improv since then. From the proggy, atonal readings of 94 and 95 to the funky reinventions of 97-98 to the post rock reimaginings of the 21st century, Tweezer has shown an uncanny adaptability to style and approach.
Lastly, I wanted to give a shoutout to this masterful ambient techno/trance mix recently posted by PJ Dorsey of Baltimore, aka Tarotplane. A true digger and a great musician/producer, PJ delivers some true fruits of the mid-90s on this one. A scene I had little contact with when it was happening, it’s amazing to let these missed, 30-year-old sounds enter and drift us away as if new.
Clearly I don’t have a choice about investigating Tarotplane. I remember someone bringing a Jade Warrior album into school once - always wondered what they actually sounded like!
Thanks for including qd21 James Bernard with these lovely selections :)