Jeffrey Alexander

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These days I’ve had Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders on, well, heavy rotation. The band’s output has been particularly potent these past few years. Dovetailing out of the great run of Dire Wolves records its hard to sometimes remember that Alexander’s output spans the further reaches of psychedelic composition, from The Iditarod’s English Rain-soaked folk and it’s count-point in chamber-folk Black Forest / Black Sea, to Alexander’s more outre sounds solo. This release touches on the latter, the bulk of the material culled from a cassette release on his own Pome Pome Tones, called Floating Lights. Flutterings embraces the spaces between Alexander’s usual genre touchstones. There’s a compositional element to it — deep New Age-bent excursions with an emphasis on late night pondering. Yet, the record also feels tethered (if the floating pieces here could ever truly be classified as tethered) to the free flow of Dire Wolves’ elemental nature.

Some tracks are scratches with memory, feeling quite in line with the nostalgia works of Leyland Kirby, particularly on the opener “Closed Eye Vision.” Elsewhere synths roar to the front, blocking the haphazard din of the day with a centering cleanse. Further on Alexander wanders into a cosmic jazz territory that’s begun to seep into the live elements in the Lidders. One listen to the build on their recent Deep in the Valley highlight, “Hidden Treasure,” and it’s easy to find some connection to “Astral Traveler.” The song has a kinship with pre-dawn psych-jazz and ambient comedowns feeling like the connective tissue between Nashville Ambient Ensemble and Aaron Dooley’s latest outing. The song is the highlight of the set, wandering around the speakers with a fogged-incandescent buzz. The album caps with an aqueous dub that brings things back down to the terrestrial plane, but doesn’t erase the buzzing of the previous track. The album has been brought to life on CD by Feeding Tube, a moment of the past reinvigorated and somehow arriving at just the right moment for folks to absorb its atmosphere.

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