Foliage
Crash Symbols, 2022
8/10
A pair of highly esteemed Canadian experimental artists, Airick Asher Woodhead (aka Doldrums, Arbutus, Sub Pop, Endless) and Jordan Christoff (PJS duo with Patrick Dique) join together for a precisely lush, atypically rhythmic and spontaneous gestured excursion made on a zoom recorder, performed and composed live on the fly, with no screens or overdubbing.
“Ripples” starts the listen with a sci-fi glow that flows with a sonic, ambient quality that’s actually quite meditative, and this creativity continues to the title track, where a repetitive dreaminess is quite captivating in a hypnotic sort of way.
The middle track belongs to “Carol”, and it twinkles with plenty of psychedelic exploration that recruits both synthetic and organic qualities, while “Melting Bicycles” is a bit noisey and spacey in its brief execution.
“Docking” arrives near the end, and somehow sounds both nature-esque and otherworldly in its hazy warmth, and “Ambient Human Power Generation” exits the listen fully immersed in fuzzy, blurry, cosmic interplay that’s as fascinating as it is perplexing.
A truly unclassifiable effort that’s light and dark, bright and shady, earthy yet not always in the physical realm, you’ve probably never heard anything like Foliage before, and that’s a big part of its charm.
Travels well with: Cartoon Forest- Cartoon Forest II; Ben Wheeler- Lurji T’algha