Prana Crafter – MindStreamBlessing
Squint as hard as you like, this is an album called MindStreamBlessing and not Mid-Stream Blessing. Short on delineated space markers but big on near-religious meditation, it’s an apt title either way. A reissue of Prana Crafter’s instrumental third LP originally released 2017 and now expanded with two new tracks (Will Sol is five albums deep these days), it’s a lush gateway to his world of beautiful guitar patterning and psychedelic meandering if you haven’t yet had the pleasure.
Largely unobtrusive percussion ebbs and flows beneath these soothing brews, singing bowls bringing a light otherworldliness to proceedings too. Before fading to zen ambience, “As The Weather Commands” however plugs in for a feedback-scorched blast of cosmic blues that really blows away the cobwebs. New cut “FingersFlowThroughOldSkokRiver” has a foot in both camps, its simmering organ drone probing the third eye beneath sleepy guitar tones while the second example of newer material, “Mycelial Morphohum”, favours Hispanic finger-picking and suffocating fly-drone.
An outdoorsy, travellin’ record, two lonely strains of guitar on the deeply relaxing “Pranja Pines” jam away gently under the cold night sky as if they were lost lovers calling out to another through disorientating forest mists. An omen to how that search may end, the nebulous ambience and hypnotic tranquillity of “Luminous Clouds” is later ripped asunder by flashing guitar riffs that streak across the mix like lightening, simmering percussion heralding a brief but brutal fuzz storm. Although resolutely a guitar lover’s album, the instrument is never used gratuitously, the open spaces of Sol’s Washington wilds never far away, MindStreamBlessing the soundtrack to some remote retreat ripe for reflection.
~The expanded version of MindStreamBlessing is re-released 18th March 2019 via the collaborative efforts of Cardinal Fuzz and Eiderdown Records.~