Mandragora Rec. 
Mu : Paradise Camp 23 (US,2006)**°
This is a collection of jams with shamanic behaviours lead by Erik Amlee on acoustic and electric guitar or sitar mostly, with close friends (Joel Boulon Boultinghouse and Nate Longeope) and wife (Aleda Jonquil) on noise electronics and keyboards. The booklet describes the inspired word ‘Musex’ (mu/muse/musics/..) as the art of spontaneous creation reaching the hidden world of the dead, while he explains this music as a direct communication with the spirits, as a shamanic technique of direct free improvisation, as an open portal to an archetypal consciousness of the muse, when being one with the music, in real-time song, and this not as communal shamanism, but as a personal and direct access to a creative world. In this case all the inspirations are slightly droning as an effect bringing to a certain vague dream state.
There are different opinions on improvisation. Personally I think that creativity is not necessarily visible only in direct improvisation. At the same time, all music where the creator and performer tends to become completely one with the creative process in it, shows through their intentions and a certain character that is involved with it. With some luck these intentions overcome the personal aspects and find the eternal links through in a process becoming completely one in its sound creation. But even with sounds as the final result, I still consider all kinds of creativity equally important for expressing something, and to get a certain result. Both composed and improvised music, can direct results, equally as long as the intuitive creative process was involved with it. With focusing too much on composition, I agree with Erik Amlee, that there is a danger we could forget making direct contact with the creative process in music, which is much more one in an improvisation, even if improvisations that really can create and achieve something for real, are always depending on the moment which was created for it. Such a momentous condition needs an occasion that can be prepared with vision, technique, mentality, personality and things that I think are also real on earth. Paradise Camp 23 creates however directly on the sonic occasion, within something that works like a drone, through jamming deeper into it. Myself, I had to make myself open to it for the vagueness of this mood, because that still is what it is. It has not reached a new construction found in another world, but the intentions to exist consciously in nothing but the moments itself that surely is achieved and recorded. And, by making a collection of such different moments, there also is a spontaneous structure and (vague) evolution in time. An enjoyable album once the listener is one with the first moment and goes along the way with it.
