Dean McPhee
Witch’s Ladder HOOD FAIRE. CD/DL/LP
Fourth full-length album from the Yorkshire kosmische guitarist.
The later work of Germanborn symbolist Agnes Pelton attempted to capture the “spiritual reality” that she experienced in moments of meditative stillness. It’s therefore no surprise that her 1933 painting, The Primal Wing, forms the cover of McPhee’s new LP. Ever since his 2008 single Water Burial, McPhee has been making music that embodies that elusive ethereal world beyond the physical. Using his bank of effects as a kind of divining instrument, McPhee crafts luminous longtrail abstractions of electric guitar, transcendent dub-like excursions that suggest states of well-being hovering on the edge of unease. Here, that unease is suggested in the album title (named after a knotted cord that aids in the chanting of spells), but also in each live-recorded track, McPhee’s bright fingerpicked melodies repeatedly echoing into dark abstraction, like a flickering campfire in a pitch-black night.