Genre: Experimental/Psychedelic/Progressive/Stoner Rock
 

Track Listing:

01 Valmistautuminen Sakastissa
02 Full-Duplex
03 Dobar Dan
04 Renko 3
05 Aivojen Varastoista
06 Toisto
 

From the forests and cabins of Finland comes this rather enigmatic project from one half of the experimental rock unit Ester Poland. So far, he’s decided to keep his name shrouded in secrecy, yet continues a steady stream of output from Finland based Wooden Sherpa records in the form of CD-R releases, and quite often, some rather odd music videos broadcast on Youtube.

Slapping a label on this unit is not really that easy, as they jump around quite a bit from release to release, though the style they seem to be rooted in is that of instrumental psychedelic rock, quite often stripped down to it’s rawer, more hypnotic forms. It may not be as “lush” or grandiose, as to suit the palate of the post-rock crowd, Kospel Zeithorn revels in influences from the late 60s and 70s, from spacey psychedelia, to raw n’ dirty blues rock, to off-the-wall krautrock legends like Faust, to even the interesting experimentation of King Crimson, topped off with some influences from early industrial music and musique concrete as a way to bleed some additional atmosphere out of their relatively simple recordings. In a way, they use repetition and hypnotism to similar effects as Hawkwind, to capture the listener with a drone, rather than bore them with it.

This is definitely the kind of record one would put on while sitting back in your lava-lit room, ingesting substances, but one can also appreciate this record for how it plays around with one’s senses using mainly rock instrumentation. It’s quite cinematic-sounding at times.

Each song really has it’s own unique character to stand out from the rest. The opening track starts us off with the sounds of clattering cans, and already I expect to begin an exercise in Neubauten-esque industrialism, even up until the addition of haunting chimes and a simple guitar riff build this short intro up, until the second track, “Full Duplex”. Starting right off the bat with some springy percussion and it’s rockingly hypnotic main riff, one is given the image of a Jimi Hendrix record stuck in a loop, forever trapping the listener in the confines of a smoky barfight scenario while background sound drifts in and out. This song would definitely NOT be out of place in some sort of psychedelic action/comedy movie, like Trainspotting, for example.

Over eight minutes of hypnotic blues, climaxing into a clamor of feedback, and we’re into another cinematic piece, this time jumping right into a twangy, swinging sort of beat that would accompany some sort of car chase scene, straight out of a Quentin Tarantino-esque spaghetti western action film. There’s actually a video for this track, “Dobar Dan”, up on the Wooden Sherpa website, of three guys(assumably the sole member of this band and his friends) enjoying beers in a lakeside cabin. Kinda home video-like, I like their other videos better.

Next is the third part of their song “Renko”, and we have definitely left Quentin Tarantino far behind, only to enter the realm of David Lynch(1990s and beyond), with it’s nervous, tense, yet altogether funk-driven beat. It’s really impossible not to imagine various scenes from movies while listening to this!! In certain ways, this track makes me also think of a local Japanese band, Oboreta Ebi, who play a very similar style of instrumental progressive funk rock while adorned with shrimp masks.
The next track is possibly the most somber, eerie track on this, with it’s disorganized rumble of percussion underlying a trebly line of guitar noodling and strumming as voices and other trippy sounds emerge to join the clamor.

The conclusive track is probably the most trance-inducing one on here, consisting of a single one-two beat and one note being strummed in a loop over an over again under a spiderwebbing mesh work of guitar noise and retro-krautrock sounding effects. As we near the final minute, the song fades out to a deep ambient bell chime, and the clamor of cans falling down the stairs leading back into where we started.

Altogether, a rather well put together release, played with a lot of flair and energy, shooting straight for the heart of all things psychedelic. Toisto hearkens back to the earlier ages of stripped down experimentalism in rock music, before we had the modern bombast of movements like post-rock. I am curious about what they’ve done on other releases, as the videos I’ve seen suggest they’ve moved on to more spacey ambient material, which is definitely more appreciated by myself.

Not mind-blowing, but an honest effort from this rather obscure band.