BLAKE HORNSBY – Brugmansia (2026, Cassette, Monadnock Sound & Vision) 

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Monadnock Sound & Vision

Format: Cassette, Album, Limited Edition

Release Date: 7 Aug 2026

Over the past few years, Blake Hornsby has quietly carved out his own peculiar corner of the psychedelic underground, somewhere between American Primitive guitar, Acid Folk, Indian raga, improvisation, and the sounds of the natural world. Having previously reviewed his “A Village of Many Springs” [Review] and spoken with Blake about his music and influences [check it here], I have been particularly curious to hear where this restless journey would take him next. With “Brugmansia”, the answer is both familiar and unexpected.

Where “A Village of Many Springs” was an almost entirely instrumental affair, built around guitar explorations, raga-inspired drones and extended improvisational passages, “Brugmansia” opens up into a much more song-oriented world. The South Asian influence is still very much alive, but this time it is woven into a strange and beautiful form of progressive acid folk, where lyrical storytelling, fingerpicked guitars, tabla, violin, cello, flute, electric guitar and E-Bow coexist with field recordings and eerie fragments of the natural world. 

Hornsby is joined here by a particularly fascinating cast of musicians, each adding another colour to this already richly textured landscape: Mallar Goswami on tabla, Sam Fanthorpe on violin and vocals, Buck Curran contributing electric guitar and E-Bow, Helena Espvall on cello, Gwen Young on flute and vocals, and David Colohan on whistle. Their contributions never feel ornamental; instead, they become part of the album’s strange organic fabric, allowing Hornsby’s songs to drift naturally between acoustic folk intimacy, Eastern meditation, psychedelic improvisation and something altogether more elusive. 

Released on cassette by Monadnock Sound & Vision, “Brugmansia” feels perfectly at home in that format: an intimate, slightly mysterious artefact that rewards repeated listening and reveals new details each time around. And like the poisonous, night-blooming plant that gives the album its name, there is something deceptively beautiful about it — inviting you closer before quietly reminding you that psychedelic music has always had a darker, stranger side.

“Brugmansia” contains 8 tracks in total. The album opens with “Solanaceae”, a wonderfully weird introduction built almost entirely around field-recorded sounds of nature, voices, and an experimental sonic scale, immediately establishing an atmosphere that feels more like entering an unfamiliar environment than simply starting a record. From there, “The Child & The Crow” slowly unfolds with a sampled voice explaining meditation, sound and silence, floating over a droning atmosphere and delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The whole thing is deeply drenched in the spirit of late-60s British Acid Folk, with The Incredible String Band coming immediately to mind, but Hornsby takes things into much stranger territory through eerie percussion, bizarre background sounds and, eventually, the entrance of the sitar, which adds a mysterious, dark and strangely exotic dimension to the piece. The track eventually circles back to the sampled voices, leaving behind the feeling of having wandered into some particularly psychedelic and beautifully weird ritual. “The Singing Bells Of Chimes” pushes the ceremonial character even further, creating an almost funereal acoustic drone world where chanting-like vocals, hypnotic repetition and experimental textures evoke the image of an ancient shamanic ceremony taking place somewhere deep inside a dark forest. There is a hallucinogenic quality to the whole thing, and at certain moments I am reminded of Eric Burdon’s more psychedelic, chant-oriented excursions, particularly the atmosphere of “Winds Of Change”, though here the feeling is much looser, more hypnotic and ceremonially psychedelic. “Brugmansia” arrives as another strange interlude, once again built from field recordings, crowd noises and voices, functioning almost like a brief sonic doorway between the album’s longer journeys.

“A Song For Our Eyes To Hear” then brings us back into a more recognisable Acid Folk territory, deeply inspired by the late-60s musical world of Mike Heron and The Incredible String Band, while I can also detect a few echoes of Jake Holmes lurking beneath the surface. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar, an intimate acoustic setting and a distinctly psychedelic atmosphere make this one of the album’s most beautiful examples of Hornsby’s ability to inhabit the Acid Folk tradition without simply reproducing it. “While Lying In A Field Of Datura Stramonium” begins with backwards sound recordings and immediately introduces a more experimental and unsettling mood, with acoustic psychedelia slowly emerging beneath continuing reversed vocals. There is something ancient and pagan-like about it, something genuinely creepy lurking beneath the apparently gentle acoustic framework, as if the listener has stumbled upon a ritual that perhaps should have remained undiscovered. “Rishikesh” takes us further east, returning to the fingerpicked acoustic guitar and late-60s/early-70s British Acid Folk vocabulary, but transforming it into something resembling a lysergically drenched Raga. The Eastern-tinged character is particularly strong here, yet it never feels like a simple exercise in exoticism; instead, it becomes another pathway into Hornsby’s strange psychedelic universe, flirting freely with the weirder side of Acid Folk from past ages. Finally, “Eaecanalos” closes the circle by mirroring the opening track, returning to field-recorded sounds of nature, backwards noises and an experimental atmosphere. Rather than providing a conventional ending, it feels as though the album simply disappears back into the landscape from which it emerged, leaving the listener somewhere between an acid-folk dream, an ancient ritual and a particularly strange walk through the woods. 

“Brugmansia” is not an album that simply looks backwards towards the golden age of Acid Folk; it digs into that past, absorbs its strangest and most psychedelic elements, and reshapes them into something personal, organic and wonderfully unsettled. Blake Hornsby has created a record where nature, Eastern influences, acoustic folk, drones and experimental sounds coexist in a beautifully hallucinogenic world. A strange little trip, indeed — and one well worth taking. Dig! TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist

Links

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