Mummy Dust Trippers – Perfect Prey / Song Of Cactus House
A seasonal 2-4-1 deal from Mummy Dust Trippers, aka Idaho Joe Winslow and the deep-psych cottage industry that is Grant Corum (Million Brazilians/Corum etc.), Perfect Prey / Song Of Cactus House is a double release of lengthy jams and follows on from a couple of demo tapes out earlier this decade. As per the press release, Perfect Prey presents “six new critical-paranoiac methods” while Song Of Cactus House is “for an imagined, living-architecture station … an out-folding, protoplasmic, psychoactive chamber open to travellers and the curious alike.”
Heady stuff indeed, Perfect Prey is a meditative stream of off-grid mumblings, Song Of Cactus House preferring to revel in instrumental and percussive rhythms. Consequently, the latter shifts with the mystic sands of time, elastic hand-drums and glottal pulses snaking a mesmeric dance of death over cool, Arabian badlands. Alternating between the bellowing of some unseen forest demon and twinkling electronics, soft chimes and pipes combine to make a major play for higher-plane hypnotism. Lie back as it closes out, drinking in the solar winds of the cosmos, a trip on the edge of going bad, your heartbeat rendered a throbbing strain of oppression.
Deploying warped acoustic guitar and ghostly, half-remembered lyrics, Perfect Prey is in turn simultaneously more human and yet more alien. A tribal burbling of moans, sheet noise and sawing strings, the percussion shimmers and splashes, a creeping darkness keeping you on edge. Pipe this in the tropics exhibit at your local zoo and the kids would freak. There’s a sacred intimacy on display here too, watery ambience a window to a smoky ancient world we’re not supposed to be seeing, exotic wood-winds, synths and buzzing drones leading the out-there experiment off to more rarefied pastures still. It’s for good reason we’re advised to inhale this one with “extreme caution”.
~Perfect Prey and Song Of Cactus House are out now on Psychic Sounds.~