The Salamander side-project activity (c.f. Vortex Navigation Company) continues with Gentle Tasaday, forum for Salamander guitarist Erik Wivinus and Dorothy Flight Pattern's Eric Horferber. FROM THE MIND'S EYE OF A BLIND TASADAY's sprawling, hallucinatory blur of smeared fretwork, freeform percussion, Pagan folk, and surrealist tape-play lives up to its most vivid titles--"Psychedelic Emergency" and "Of Cobwebs and Obtuse Angels." These bookend tracks are also TASADAY's funniest, freakiest offerings--intense bad-acid soundscaping, with the former lifting its entwined commentary from visionary poet Rimbaud, hypnosis tapes, and an after-school anti-drug special. You'll want to just say "yes" to such devilishly self-referential homebrew psychotropia.
When they're not indulging in spooked astral atmospherics ("Stone Grape," "Hypnagogic Afterthought"), Wivinus and Horferber peddle a clutch of fantastic acid-dipped folk frolics. Think Current 93, but with the even creepier ghosts of rural Americana substituting for cod nursery Gnosticism. "Summer Story," "Reading the Sun," and "Walking on Coals to the Coldest Despair"--all whispered utterances, chiming guitars, elemental revenants, and mystic implications--transcend their humble wyrdfolk roots and soar on Wivinus' splendorous six-string soliloquies. And the awesome "Vision Burn," "Sad Wheel of the Seasons," and "Gethsemane Aflame" really throw open the doors to your imagination--supernatural consequences be damned.
