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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Limited to 100! Eco-friendly full-color gatefold digipak & professionally-duplicated CD-R that combines both the Temple of the Roses EP and the Woven in the Fabric bonus cassette tracks.
Note: disc is playable on all CD drives and players with CD-R playback capability, but may not be able to be read by older CD units.
Includes unlimited streaming of Woven in the Fabric
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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The five-year development of Ash Brooks' debut solo vinyl release Temple of the Roses drew a trove of songs within its orbit. A devout DIY home-recorder for several years before beginning work on what would become her first publicly released material (2018's Crown of Thyme cassette), more than a dozen of Ash's original songs were demoed or fully tracked across four different home studios between 2015 and 2018 in consideration for her vinyl debut. As the sound of Temple of the Roses coalesced around the four tracks that ultimately comprised its final tracklist, a patchwork quilt of "almost there" recordings began to emerge to provide a wider view of Ash's uniquely dreamlike melding of sacred forest folktale and mushroom ceremony psychedelia.
Woven in the Fabric collects five songs that were at one point considered for inclusion on the Temple of the Roses EP or its originally conceived LP form (under the name Rana Mu). More a refracting lens than a mirror of its parent release, Woven in the Fabric offers a unique approach on each track, inviting threads of inspiration from a deep underground pool. Opener "Sister Anubis" is the clearest bridge from the world of Temple; broadcasting the fever-dream message of a priestess of Anubis--the Egyptian god of the underworld--Ash's rhythm and lead guitars and soaring vocals find the company of loosely tuned tack piano, double-drums, and trance-dancing basslines for a wild and free psych stomp. The elysian "Mayan Daughter" follows, built around a simple looped acoustic guitar phrase and double-tracked vocal melodies that find the lush middle ground between lullaby and hymnal. The A-side closer "Blue Morning"--originally written by Ash at age 16--is the set's wildest curveball: a stock Casio keyboard drum pattern and doo-wop style bass and organ underlay gently chopped and slewed torch-pop vocals. With production inspired by 80s Cambodian pop and Jamaican dub (highlighted by the extended melodica-and-organ duet in the instrumental bridge), it's a sound not approached by any Flower Room release to-date, but honestly represents the degree of variety in the "mystical blend" that informs all our work.
The B-side-dominating psych collage "Cloak of Many Colors > Space Cloak" follows, its trippy aura spiraling off in three distinct directions. The first movement lifts off immediately upon a hybrid Laurel Canyon / Fillmore West private press acid-folk-funk workout, before melting into an abstract afterhours hash den hallucination - complete with sitar and wordless vocal trails that spread like thick streams of incense smoke. Out of this drift arises a full-immersion lucid dream, wherein the "imaginary" rock band created out of multitrack recording in the first movement has taken material form as the presence of New Hampshire psych group Soft Eyes, with Ash fronting and laying down a wild wah-wah'ed organ solo amid blown-out speakers and a rowdy crowd of revelers. Woven in the Fabric's final landing is with "Strawberry Moon"; built upon Ash's original bedroom self-recording, it is the clearest window into the cache of songs she had written and recorded prior to her Flower Room collaborations. Gracefully cosmic and earthbound in equal measure, late-night vocals trace an instantly memorable melodic line to a fully instrumental chorus, cycling back for ever-higher-reaching voices and finally leaving the gravitational field completely with an utterly extraterrestrial synth and dual-backmasked electric guitar solo.
Taken together, Woven in the Fabric and Temple of the Roses offer a complete view of Ash Brooks' singular vision of experimental dream-pop and psych-folk: sounds, lyrics, images, and stories outside of time, scene, trend, and dimensions of reality.
credits
released May 22, 2020
All music and lyrics by Ash Brooks.
Ash Brooks: acoustic and electric guitars, voice, organ, synth
with
Matt LaJoie: bass guitar, percussion and drums, electric guitar (1, 4, and 5), tack piano (1), melodica (3), sitar (4)
and featuring the live Soft Eyes band on "Space Cloak":
Luke Goudreault (electric lead guitar), Rachel Neveu (electric rhythm guitar), Joey Schneider (bass guitar), and Gabe Camarano (drums); recorded live at Wrong Brain (Dover, NH), July 29, 2016.
Recorded and mixed March 2015 - August 2018 at Animal Farm (Portland, ME), Mount Misery (Barrington, NH), Green Lodge (Brunswick, ME), and 4847 (Hope, ME) by AB & ML; mastered by ML at The Den (Portland, ME) April 2020.
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