Review Summary: It’s there, and it moves.
Did any of you read Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967), or maybe see the half-wonderful, half-disappointing movie adaptation by Peter Weir (1975)?
a) If you have:
I have a good analogy for you: this album might as well have been its soundtrack.
b) If you haven’t:
Please read it. Then maybe also go see the movie adaptation, but very much please read the thing. That book is an Australian classic for a reason, and, for those with a compact attention span, it’s a short one at that. It’s also one of the most strongly resonating books I’ve read in a long while.
The psychedelic story is set in 1900, and tells about a school for girls and the disastrous events that play out during an outing at the titular Hanging Rock. This mysterious place in the Australian outback exudes a strong, naturalistic force that causes many strange events to happen, with the majority of the novel concerning the results of what occurred that day, in the sweltering Summer heat. Think Lord Of The Flies, but then totally different. I will not tell more, you know enough now to get my silly analogy.
Back to the record, then. Panghalina consists of three Australian women, who use their voices (two of them), drums and percussion (two of them), and some acoustic instruments (including double bass) and electronics to create a tribalistic, mystic, and utterly natural atmosphere. Just like the book it seems to explore the relationship of humanity and nature, with its organic, loose, and very jazzy drones and a wonderfully spacious, echoing production. You can almost hear the drum fills and field recordings reverberate among the rocks somewhere in the scorched Aussie landscape. “We’ve named the album ‘Lava’”, Panghalina write on their Bandcamp page, “drawing inspiration from the melding of our sounds that resonates with the characteristics of molten rock - its subdued, unhurried motion juxtaposed against its fiery core.” The powerful imagery of lava coming down a slope does indeed fit wonderfully to the music itself. It’s there, completely beyond our power, and it moves.
The album goes from freeform jazz, to chorally driven ambient, to soundscape, and improv drone without batting a sun-bleached eyelash. Sometimes the record goes a little overboard with the loose and ethereal oohs and aaaaahs, but that is only a minor blemish on what is one of my favourite albums of the year so far. If you want to dream away for a while, and float to the grey-green, dry, and leafy rocks: by all means, look this one up, press play, and relax.
But beware…
You never know if you are able to come back.
