I get this big package in the mail and the first thing I see is lovely packaging, nice cover art and an hour of psychedelic free drone. It’s sort of the best Christmas gift I’ve never gotten. This nine piece group, heavy on Rob Magill’s saxophone, trots all over the earth from primitive stomp, string heavy drone, to jazz group jams that bring to mind the bigger bands of Sun Ra. Some portions of side one even sound like Magill quoting “A Love Supreme” or maybe I’m projecting because it has a similar loose feel and permissive quality not just for the group, but for the listener.

A little more than half way through side one, the group stops hanging back and briefly gets super wonky with a series of weird riffs and then settles back into a loose groove while Natalie Alyse’s cooing vocals start to bring things way down in tempo. The strings take the spotlight and get druggy in their atmospheric drone. Magill’s sax bleats in and out and scrapes of something also complete the sound.

Side two starts out darker, the drone chilly and bleak, and the sax strangling its notes out. It sounds like it was recorded in a meat locker; you can practically see the steam rising off the instruments. The sound of the room and its natural reverb seem to dominate the proceedings, the instruments coming up like a blip against the full sound of the area. That’s not to say that it is poorly recorded, but instead using the place of the recording as another instrument for the track. That chilly atmosphere continues as the sound of violent wind, the kind that swirls fallen leaves into tornados on the sidewalk starts to drown out all the sounds except for the dominant organ drone that has anchored the entire side thus far.

Once the cold air is over, we’re treated to a raucous jam straight off of the Faust catalog. Loose and driving without relying on blues riffs and plenty of room for the weirder sounds to come in. Hell it could even be a jam from the Funhouse sessions, that’s the kind of sweaty pound you get from this. But then before you know it, you’re deep in some ambient swirl world, with soft synth lines, what sounds like field recordings, and bells & gongs. Before you know it, you’re drifted off and it’s over. And I’ll sit, breathlessly waiting for more. 9/10 -- Andrew Murdock Livingston (10 November, 2009)