Important Rec. 
Kurt Weisman : Spiritual Sci-Fi (US,2008)**°'
So far, I wasn’t a real fan of Sci-Fi stories in music because they often sound like being inspired from either unreachable, rather often alienated forms of escapism, and what I heard so far always had the impression of missing the right connections with a real significance beyond certain contents, in an Erich Von Däniken rationalisation way of what is seen, without further investigation or notice of more complete contexts. Still I remained curious to what the psychfolk related Feathers community member would come up with. In this case alienation is another form of musical psychedelia, taking away folk roots from the forests, flooding over the cities like a radio transmission to the unknown, far away in space, or into the future (just listen to “cat people of the new ice age”). This is the world after the big disasters, forming a new romantic folk style with additional electronic soft beats (just listen to “the great flood”). The combination of acoustic guitar and sweet vocals with this electronica has in fact something funny and is unusual as a combination, exotic perhaps. The musical story continues… “The Young Pioneers discover magic” is comparable, but is completely electronic, keyboards and drums, with a deformed high toned helium voice, a place to improvise and resulting in a -slightly chaotic- avant-nonsense kind of fun on keyboards + drums, alienated and weird, evolving to what sounds in the end like the discovering of a new-future exotica. Finally this evolves to peace on the next track, where the penguin-esque keyboards calm down, and a new song appears with acoustic guitar, some plucked string instrument (?), electric bass and violin, and some arrangement with additional trumpet : well arranged strange new music. Also “Camp Arden” is well arranged, and hidden in it seems to be something of a medieval folk dance arranged as new chamber music, as if provoking and introducing a New World folk dance, on guitars, soprano sax, violin? On “Mother Daughter Day” to the acoustic guitar, strange keyboards, odd game-like sounds appear together with a fairies provoking female voice. The well arranged strangeness in the arrangements in combination with the sweet folk song hidden in this cage of strange music, sounds a bit like a next step to Art Bears or so. There’s also a part with Fripp-ean guitars combined with psych organ. The last track continues with more strange improvisations, with elements of jazz, avant-garde ideas and psychrock. Even when the complete concept as it sounds like it wasn’t entirely planned as such, I think the result is very much conceptualized, as if this album presents the rediscovering of a folk origin in a world dominated by ice, disasters and addiction to technological surroundings which cover up a further development to something independent, human and spiritual. The result in mind is a confused human being living between the memory of folk origins, his human soul and a technological and ice cold world disaster. In that way: well done.
Participants on this album are : Asa Irons on electric bass (7,8) ; Chris Weissman : reed organ (7,8) ; Clara Shin : harp (5) ; Edward Mari : clarinets (5) ; Joshua Stamper : double bass, guitars, arranging, engeneering, mixing (5) ; Krzysztof Gadawski : violins (5) ; Kyle : piano (7), electric guitars (8) ; Nathan Blehar : tenor saxophone (7,8) ; Raub Roy : processing, submixing (1) ; Robert Stillman : soprano sax (6), tenor sax (7), drumset (8) ; Ruth Garbus : vocals (1), clarinet (7,8) ; Thomas Gotwals : trumpets (5) ; Xiao Ning Xue : gu zheng (5).
