Secret Eye
Spires That in the Sunset Rise : Four Winds The Walker (US,2005)*****
What will happen if 4 woman go into mystic rock? 'Spires that In The Sunset Rise' are such four women from Chicago : Kathleen Baird - Vocals, acoustic, electric and slide-guitar, drums, harmonium, Georgia Vallas - Vocals, mbira, bul bul tarang, zither, Turkish lap banjo, lap slide guitar, harmonium, Taralie Peterson - Vocals, cello, guitar, banjo, mbira, and Tracy Peterson - Percussion, bells, mbira, thumb piano, washboard, rattlers.
They played on the underground psychedelic Million Tongues Festival at Chicago's Empty Bottle, along with Josephine Foster, Espers, MV and EE, Nick Castro, Kawabata Makoto and Kinski. They later joined the Incredible String Band for six dates on their US tour.
The style on this new, second album, is evolved and different and more direct but also more directly weird compared to the debut. The inspiration for the music is as if driven by a conscious shamanistic drugged campfire inner dreamtrance vision. There are tons of weird vocals, and a perfect use of strange, weird sounds and strange colour harmonies all over the place, with some focused acoustic guitars, here and there some chamber like arrangements, always experimental in an intuitive ? magical sense. The vocals sometimes are so odd that at times they recall a ghostly sphere. Also the somewhat ritual rhythms seem to react on a border line edge of a paraphysical situation, with knocking ghosts’ sounds, or with marching dead rhythmic weirdness. In combination of it all the music can again be so incredibly hypnotic in a different way, as what I can recall, I’ve never heard before. It is as if the group knows how to use some secret harmonies that gets a listener out-there. In some way it is like the expression with the essence of true magical ethnical ritual music, as a standing stone for a bridge to other worlds and towards different experiences. The effect is so powerful, overwhelming and slurping in all attention from you, that I can not imagine any framed thinker will survive his now fried brainwave changes, which this music can cause, making a recollection perceptiveness switch necessary towards more open visions. It's hard to believe if there would be no deliberate strong believe or philosophical system behind this, other than an intuitive tension, because it really is that powerful. Also incredible is that this tension is continuous for over an hours length, with just a few quiet moments, but even there it is never related to a more ordinary world perspective at all. The music sounds more pagan “magickal” than from any pagan, and more magical than from any inherited repeated ritual. Great!!
