E GONE – Adventures Before The Body (2024, LP Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records/Sunrise Ocean Bender – Deep Water Acres)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records/Sunrise Ocean Bender – Deep Water Acres

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Black Vinyl, (Presented in reverse-board cover, pressed on ‘classic black’ vinyl, w/poly-lined inner sleeve. Includes full-color insert in tribute to Sunrise Ocean Bender / Kevin McFadin), 250 copies

Release Date:  5 July 2024

Behind the name E Gone is a guy called Daniel Westerlund, Daniel is a Folk, Psych, and experimental musician from Sweden, founder of The Goner, and sole member of Fyrskeppet among others. “Adventures Before the Body” is his long-awaited latest excursion into cosmically earthy musical alchemy, rounding out a trilogy of albums beginning in 2013 with “All the Suns of the Earth” and continuing with “Advice to Hill Walkers” in 2016 (both also released by Deep Water Acres and Sunrise Ocean Bender). 

“Adventures Before the Body” is released by Cardinal Fuzz / Feeding Tube Records, in collaboration with Deep Water Acres, and in tribute to Sunrise Ocean Bender Records and Kevin McFadin. The press release states: 

“Musically, ‘Adventures…’ builds on its predecessors’ eclecticism and love of sonic juxtapositions—astute psychedelic guitar lines swirled together with exotic instrumentation and modal motifs, rock riffs alongside ethnic percussion and old-school beats, drones and atmospheric effects blending into electronic deep dives. A pair of songs bring back Westerlund’s vocals, though the overall compositional logic scales up from the shorter instrumental pieces on ‘Advice…’ into more progressive territory (most notably the 14-minute title track). As that suggests, ‘Adventures’ also extends the triptych conceptually – if ‘All the Suns…’ was about waking up and breaking free, and ‘Advice… was a metaphorical travel guide of diverse vignettes, ‘Adventures’ is about expansion or explosion, whether outwards or inwards; evoking, in the man’s own words, ‘a feeling of vertigo in the vastness of the universe…’

That said, deep philosophical musings are in no way necessary to appreciate the sheer enjoyment within ‘Adventures’…’ grooves. These are songs and sounds of mystery and wonder, as sonically experimental as they are melodically accessible, taking form somewhere outside of conventional genre lines… An album of shifting textures and formidable scope that rewards attentive ears and repeat listening”…

“Adventures Before the Body” consists of just 5 songs, 3 on the 1st side and the rest 2 on the 2nd. The opener “My Head, the Slum Capital of Western Thought” is an Ethnic-flirting track with a Middle Eastern tribal-like intro and a tremendous acidly drenched late 60s West Coast Freak-Psychedelic guitar sound, generally speaking, this is an “eerie” track and as it slowly evolves (with the use of instruments such as darbuka and tanpura), it becomes a fantastic Middle Eastern-influenced piece of modern Psych-a-something! “Moon, You Are Not Scattered Enough” has the same “ethnic” feel, maybe there’s more of a sense of “Africa” than “Middle Eastern”, the intro with its mysterious trippy percussion dives deeply into the late 60s Psych, there are lots of various trippy sounds, a nice acoustic guitar melody fills the place, some string instrument (a banjo or something like that) adds some coolness while the track is getting even more mysteriously dark and then there’s that amazing acoustic psychedelic atmosphere that almost makes you wanna scream “Hey Mr. Conductor tell us where are we going?”, yes, exactly, that mystic PSYCHEDELIC atmosphere of Serpent Power’s LP (1967) comes instantly to mind, a track so deep, so mind-bending and acoustically trip-a-delic! “Erewhonaut” has “preaching’ lyrics, an acoustic psychedelic background, and an exotic psych aura all over, the track is built upon a magnificent acoustic guitar slowly leading the listener to Transcendence, of course, there are here and there a few “electrical outbursts”, but the whole environment here moves around to that “Ethnic” psychedelic feel… Side ‘B’ opens with “Limbo Dweller”, a fantastic piece of experimental weird transcendental trippy futuristic PSYCH, deeply electronically-effected as loads of electric guitars processed through modular synth effects, with a Middle Eastern touch and some really eerie orchestration, love it! The last one which is my favorite here is called “Adventures Before the Body”, it’s a 14:50min track and E Gone says about it “…the longest song I’ve ever done, the goal all along was to make the jammiest song ever for a solo artist, to get as close to a live band feeling that I could, I had recorded loads of tracks for it, guitars upon guitars upon guitars…”. It starts under a deep dark electronic “psych” way just before numerous electric guitars start making sounds, noises, or whatever, it seems that the whole thing here acts like a real long Jam where everybody feels free to get in, a steady drum beat leads the way while one of the “twenty” guitars pays tribute to that late 60s West Coast remarkable astonishing Psychedelic sound, the place overfloods with colorful psychedelic sounds – I swear I head Jerry somewhere there – and when analog and modular synths take over, this is when the REAL SOUND EXPERIMENT starts, you get the feel of being inside a Ken Kesey Acid Test (trying to pass it) and the band there (E Gone) is trying to help you with their live stoned hallucinated trippy amalgam of live music, wow! This must be one of those songs out there that helps you to trip back in Time, a song acting like a way back Timemachine… That Good! “Adventures Before the Body” is going (of course) to be one of the best releases of 2024. Go grab the LP album, now! TimeLord Michalis 

Tracklist

Links:

Listen/Buy through E GONE Bandcamp

Get it via SUNRISE OCEAN BENDER

Alternatively, grab it via SHINY BEAST Mailorder

Visit E GONE Web