Marshead Records
The Phoenix Cube : Tyranny of Bird Song (UK,2005)**°
Simon Lewis drummed with a handful of bands and participates with Phorum, an improvisational group, and the acoustic Plankton Bloom, and besides is the on line review editor for the Ptolomaic Terrascope magazine. Left alone with some of his musical interests he tried to build his own one man band together to create the music he loved to hear, with the help of a four track recorder and for this recording some additional help from Alan Davidson (from psych-folk s-sw project, Kitchen Cynics), Geoff Puplett (from his other group Phorum) and Cara Lewis (from the second group of his, Plankton Bloom). Phoenix Cube's music basically is a kind of ambient daydream, sleepwalking and adrift (-if I can use deliberately some of the titles to describe this music-), perhaps meant as a cosmic trip but with an awareness of having our feet on the ground, with an awareness of earthly rhythms. Just listen like birds, in sync, communicating their awareness amongst themselves !
“Spring” starts off with some birds sounds mixed with electronic birds in the background and some aeroplane-over the hill-scraping sounds, followed by a slightly distorted voice singing about voices in spring, until keyboards take over the mood and the whole sphere becomes governed by the birds again. “Walk on Water” is a song with acoustic guitar, woodclap, some crystal keyboards, and again, some birds. “Daydream” I recognised as a short contribution by Alan Davidson, on electrified guitar and flute, working as an intro for “On a Green hill (revelation)”. This track is a kind of somewhat earthly Cosmic soundscape made from keyboards, electronic and sequenced sounds and rhythms (some of them are nice & with a very heavy bass), with a small part with some folk kind of singing and distorted harmonic voices, until an acoustic guitar takes over the lead, evolving towards mostly acoustic rhythms, playing an ode like earth ritual. The piece works like a deliberate conscious daydream on earth, like trying to get the listener into a conscious state of awareness of an essence which can be compared to the consciousness of birds to their earthly existence. Then the background choir voice becomes almost religious, accompanied by a keyboard drone while birds sounds are the celebration of its musical ritual. “Tumbling down” is an acoustic sad song on guitar, with some second wahwah guitar. “Bugs” with spacey and rhythmic electronica and keyboards has a nice spoken word piece spoken by Cara. On “Daydream 2”, ‘part 1’ is taken to create a melancholic song of top of it. “Drift onto the song” is another song with strummed electrified, some rhythmbox touches and electronic effects, with a very nice instrumental outro with guitars like fuzz guitar, and keyboards. This flows fluently into the beautiful dreamy psychfolkpop track “Lost in Space”. “Sun Lit Cloud” is an accapella song with some varying echo adrifting voice, with some background noises, first of a farm steam engine or something, then with a telephone ringing, as if between a dream and reality awareness. Last track “Sleepwalking” is an instrumental dreamy outro adrift with keyboards, and sequenced rhythmic electronica. A rewarding musical experience.
