Digitalis IndustriesThe Golden Oaks : We enter these white woods (US,2005)*°
I had to listen a couple of times to this release because, like The Juniper Meadows release, this project suffers from tiresome quick-happy improvisational creativity, even when Brad Rose and Keith Wood know already how to build a sphere/mood. While there are only little articulations and some ideas are just like partial mood-things in some way, the second track “Wildwood Salvation” succeeds best. This evolves nicely into the moody sleepy song “Magnetic Foliage” (picked guitar & harmonica). “Willows gently bending” is more tiresome and fits in. But with the additional last track with flutes and drones as completion, as a combination of boring and tiring droning sounds really becomes too much for me. I can understand the tension the musicians had with this recording, but for a complete recording on the same monotony without articulations can’t really convince me completely. The inspiration in general still is too much an occasional moment of acoustic improvisation which is worked out on various levels with at least some kind of lazy haziness. I don’t know if it’s the lack of enough self-criticism keeping the artists from working further on their material or ideas, to reshape and transform them, develop them, making them compositions of change that have their own balanced communicative world, rather than they are now, still having this feeling of loss and woolly creativity. Like life itself that should better be reconsidered more often, I guess there is more to life than a seemingly controlled beating of each lost moment, but not replacing it by something better than a mood to fill up, like smoking a joint and be stoned a bit but not change anything for real. I’m still left with the feeling the music creativity is partially stuck in the rehearsal room as wallpaper music. Some small ideas were born but these are still thorned to some lost feeling, captured in the ghostly shades of the forest of life.
