Strange Attractors
Nick Castro & The Poison Tree : Further from Grace (US,2005)****'
A friend of mine visited me lately, and wanted to hear everything from the new acid folk scene. He was a big fan of the best 70’s folk classics. He was amazed and immediately convinced of the typical for the 70’s true music feeling in Gravenhurst, the first 2 Faun Fables, Marissa Nadler, Born Heller, In Gowan Ring’s “Hazel Steps”, and Nick Castro. For this album Nick Castro partly seems to have profited in a new born area of acid folk / folk, almost making it sound easy to make something valuable in this newly formed independent post-British folk sphere.
The Poison Tree is lead by Nick Castro on guitars, piano, organ, whistles, mijwiz, voice, with Otto Hauser, percussion, dumbek, trap kit, with Helena Espvall on flute, cello, percussion, with Chris Smith, bass, and Adam Hershberger on flugelhorn. It also has Meg Baird (Espers) on lap dulcimer, and Josephine Foster, voice, both on “Sun Son”, and who toured with Nick Castro.
Nick Castro succeeds in creating a magical sphere throughout. Many tracks are song lead but with space for beautiful arrangements, and with some instrumental improvisations, like “Music For Mijwiz” which is an acid driven middle eastern improvisation, and especially longer on “Deep Deep Sea”, with a melancholic flugelhorn, cello, 12 string guitar, percussion. The beautiful opening track “Sun Song” has weird background choir vocal arrangements by Josephine Foster, with flute, cello and hand percussion, and a somewhat controlled psychedelic effect. A couple of other songs, like “Waltz for a little Bird” or the earlier mentioned "Deep Deep See" have nice flugelhorn improvisations. Most songs but not all are played with 12 string guitar. Another classic.
