Holy Tongue, Shackleton

Holy Tongue's humid, ritualistic dubs are blotted into Rorschach shapes by Shackleton on this kaleidoscopic collaboration- one for fans of Creation Rebel's hypnotic 'Starship Africa' or Don Cherry's head-mangling 'Eternal Rhythm'.

Only a few moments after releasing the ace 'Jinxed by Being' with US wyrd folk journeyman Six Organs of Admittance, Shackleton is back with another labyrinthine full-length, this time breaking bread with Valentina Magaletti, Al Wooton and Susumu Mukai. The four bumped into each other in Sweden when they were booked at the same festival, and although Holy Tongue were initially keen for Shackleton to provide them with a remix, the idea duly evolved into a fully-fledged collab. Magaletti, Wooton and Mukai put their heads down in the studio and sent their free-flowing jams to Shackleton, who rebuilt them from the ground up, using his arcane production magic to warp Holy Tongue's spiritual jazz and dub cogitations into undulating fractal peregrinations.

The most remarkable thing about this one is that you can hear exactly what each member contributed; different from Holy Tongue's last album 'Deliverance And Spiritual Warfare', 'The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now' has been fully dilated by Shackleton, but Magaletti's unmistakable percussion, Mukai's driving bass and Wooton's synthwork still holds everything together. The band's rusty post-punk stylings take a back seat this time around - Shackleton has sanded down the rusted edges, vaporising the distortion and transmogrifying the trio's pebbly freeform experiments into cloudy, dream-diary observations. 'Blessed and Bewildered' is a perfect early example, a blunted dubwise slump that's dilated over eight minutes and embraced by evaporated horns and spectral organ blasts that faint into Magaletti's subtle vibraphone vamps.

Shackleton's processes are exceptionally elegant - the usual signatures are still there (woozy tape stops, spiraling bells, soundsystem-bursting bass weight), but he never overwhelms the trio's core energy. At times, it's almost as if he's arranging instruments rather than adding anything specific: on the feverish 'The Fruit of the Fall', the pattering hand drums, swirling organs and surging basslines seem to drop into the producer's rhythmic mode almost magically, vanishing from cheeky dub into an esoteric ritual before you've even realized. It can't help but remind us of Adrian Sherwood's vital early work on Creation Rebel's 'Starship Africa', when he famously lodged himself behind the mixing desk blindfolded, using his instincts to guide the stems into mind-altering fissures. Shackleton sounds similarly reflexive here, working already hallucinogenic material like putty until it seethes and surges with third-eye-opening shades.

Our highlight arrives with the bizarre and brilliant 'The Merciful Lake', a skipping roots wobbler that's pushed into the glittering ether by its soulful vocal chorus. Shackleton replies to the band's lavish, late-'70s style fusion by curving modal flutes around Holy Tongue's rubbery drums and Miles Davis-esque guitar prangs, and letting pillowy pads melt the rest of the instrumentation into pure cosmic bliss.