ANCIENT LIGHTS
11Paraonoias and 5ive members trip out
Fancy a trip? Ancient Lights certainly do. An extraordinary meeting of mantra-fuelled minds, this collaboration between Adam Richardson (11Paranoias/ ex-Ramesses) and 5ive guitar guru Ben Carr was born as an idea when their old bands toured and jammed together in 2004. More than a decade later, and with drummer Tim Bertilsson installed as the last piece of the sonic puzzle, that idea has become a mind-spinning reality on Ancient Lights’ eponymous debut.
“The immense combined sound of both bands fuelled the flame,” Adam recalls. “It just took 13 years to become ablaze. The clinching addition of Tim to our phantasmal band catalysed the dream into a plane of almost existence. That’s a sentiment that I think is audible on our LP. It’s a sound that at once came from nowhere and everywhere.”
A freewheeling, drone-driven ramble through dense, hallucinatory forests and sun-ravaged, cavernous mental plains, the music on Ancient Lights emerged from the trippy doom equivalent of so-called ‘automatic’ writing.
“Even we are unsure how most of these explorations were generated,” he confesses. “We recorded six hours of music and grabbed a small amount of the ripe fruit. These inaugural songs are subconscious creations and are often surprising in outcome as well as in their effect upon the listener and ourselves.”
What Ancient Lights are peddling is not for the resolutely earthbound, but for those happy to tune in to their disorientating frequencies, presumably while baked beyond all recognition, the psychedelic potential is undeniable. For Adam, the songs conjure “an invented universe that is eternally evolving through mass experience and linked consciousness – an endlessly blooming yet crowded galaxy of black stars that will not shine on you and will remain occulted from view even though you can feel them pressing down on you all the time.
“But I don’t want to influence what people see inside their minds,” he concludes. “I’d rather they all have their own trip and compare notes with others after their journey has ended.”