4. Ozric TentaclesArborescence
This band came into my life in 1993 or 1994. I was just discovering cannabis and it was blowing my mind. Obviously, I went too far with it because there was no guidance and no-one really understood that it was a strong thing then. But before it went like that, I had this kind of golden period which I now look back at as formative for everything I’ve ever done since. My brother had a cassette that his mate at school had given him. At the risk of getting all 90s nostalgic, compilation tapes were great. There was something magical about them but also if the person didn’t write the track list on them, they were even more magical as you had to work hard to discover who they were. The tape had songs by Seefeel, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Ozric Tentacles – a bunch of some of the coolest shit that was around at the time. I remember one of the tracks was ‘Forever’ by Orbital from Snivilisation and the way the synths worked on that were special, but there was something about Ozric Tentacles where the synths seemed to sound alive. Well, Ozric Tentacles were never cool in any sense, but it was amazing music!
‘Arborescence’ is the band at their peak I think. It’s made up of flutes and lots of field recordings of woodland and it’s unashamedly prog rock cheese, but what I’m interested in is just how beautifully recorded it is. There’s a real magic to this piece and I’ve never understood how they made some of those sounds. I still seek to make them myself to this day! Dan 7Rays and I shared the same fascination with this band. In recent years, I wanted to work out how they’d made some of these sounds and Dan went as far as to look up the old Ozric Tentacles Facebook group (which still exists) and message Ed Wynne who’s like the lead guy just to say, ‘How did you make those sounds?!’
The song has this flute but then it’s got this kind of vocal sample that’s played on a keyboard, but it’s clearly been sequenced because it’s in time, but then behind that, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear this sound that I can only describe as being like the musical translation of light on water. Ed wrote back which was amazing and he said they had recorded a snippet of vocal and then sequenced that on a sampler and it was all kind of MIDI’d up, but the sparkling sound behind it, he couldn’t identify or remember. I think there was an implication perhaps that there were some altered states of consciousness.
To me, it’s magic. I cannot now make that sound and I have no idea how to make a sound that is just like a light sparkling on water. I feel like my whole life will be spent trying to push out something that sounds like that. It was a product of a moment that will not happen again and there’s a magic to that. They were in a certain place, everything was wired up in a certain way. They were in a certain state of mind, mushroom tea was featuring very strongly, I think, and they didn’t hold back on the dosage. You listen to that and you can hear people enjoying themselves in a place – albeit a very otherworldly and very mushroom-y place!
