17/10/2024
Coming soon....Sacred Ritual to Unlock the Mountain Portal, the debut album from The Hologram People. New remix and remaster for 2024 on Sacred sunset orange 180g heavy weight vinyl with obi strip, limited to 300 copies.
From its humble - but still high-craft - original cassette release on Woodford Halse, through a subsequent CD edition from the same outlet and a highly-collectible first vinyl edition on Drone Rock Records, The Hologram People’s Sacred Ritual To Unlock the Mountain Portal has become somewhat of a kaleidoscopic kosmische-meets-psych-rock touchstone for the 2020s.
Fused together from the hive-minded coupling of multi-instrumentalists Dom Keen and Jon Parkes, with help from a handful of guests, the strengths of the album come from both its broad scholarly range and its unashamedly deft musicality. Strengths that are magnified and given even more room to breathe on this freshly remixed and remastered vinyl reissue.
Hence, across the eight gathered tracks, we’re taken through the lysergically-mapped electro-acoustic routes of Amon Düül II and Ash Ra Tempel (for the title-track and “Pray To The Maypole Witch”); drone-backed percussive slinkiness (“Lord Shiva’s Mothership”); the cinematic side roads of interregnum years Pink Floyd (“A Seventies Void”); bass-bobbing astral-funk (“Étoile Voyageuse”); symphonically-enhanced pastoralism (“Sun Breaks On Saturn’s Return”); low-slung space-rock (“Planet Sahara”); and near-ecclesiastical Tangerine Dream electronic swirling (“Deep Into The Cosmic Ocean”).
At a slender 33 minutes in duration, there is not an ounce of sonic fat on Sacred Ritual To Unlock The Mountain Portal. It should leave the converted listener regularly in need of ‘just one more spin’, to keep soaking up its sublime sophistication. Here again then, is your chance to be one of the few hundred discerning owners in corporeal form, with the luxury of indulging such a rewarding aural addiction.
Adrian
(Concrete Islands, Freq and other places)