Herb Lore - Mysticism (Inner Islands) [Psychedelic Music]

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's May 2nd Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

Herb Lore is an enigmatic Brooklynite that sounds like he was born seventy years too late, such is his awareness of the countercultural movement and its soundtrack, and as such he’s been chosen by the movement’s forest-dwelling flame keepers to give Mammon’s soulless worshippers acid-folk notice that their time is coming to an end.

For the recordings he took a method-music approach, reading all the right books and doing all the right breathing exercises before entering the creative zone to ditch the last vestiges of his ego and encourage a guitar-guided flow state for these one take recorded parts, starting the process from scractch if a shard of self managed to wiggle free and disrupt the subconscious transmission. And boy can you hear it. The recordings have a genuine mantric quality, rare patience and profound psychedelic music purity.

Sometimes, even inner journeys are better with companions, and hipped by their lack of footwear and floral crowns amidst New York’s suits and sneakers, like-minded travellers were befriended and invited to the studio. Serendipitously, Sophie Sparnroft is an angel-voiced bass player, and Bosch Akram plays a mean clarinet, although quite who the stranger playing drums that night was, we shall perhaps never know. The trio tuned in immediately, seamlessly augmenting the minimal repetition, gentle acoustic folk flow, natural & machine made sounds, hand-crafted ambient iridescence, and adding their own declarations to the cosmic manifesto. The hours were long, but the pranksters didn’t tire before their alternative message was recorded onto tape, but with one reel left, they let rip with and epic slice of freak folk-rock, as if to say this is the start, not the end.

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