The story behind this curious album is that Toronto's Doug Tielli missed a flight home after a brief UK tour and found himself stranded in the village-come-suburb of Keresley, on the outskirts of Coventry in the English Midlands.
Far from bemoaning his fate, he wound up spending two months there sleeping in the tall grass, dreaming, walking a dog, meditating on nature and recording an album's worth of songs.
These tunes seek to evoke his blissed out state of oneness with the universe with titles like Big Man Of The Underbrush and Being Mist
Hearing the result, it's tempting to conclude that his record label provided a generous supply of high quality weed to help him through this impromptu summer sojourn. This would certainly go some way to explaining lyrics like "I am free like a waterfall" (Water Falls) and "I walk like a demon and I feel like a swan" (A Dream That I Am)
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Tielli himself describes the process of composition as “a jumble of the cosmic cycle” which materialise as eight loosely improvised, free-flowing pieces featuring voice, guitar, percussion and brass with Lovelovelove being the freakiest of them all.
It's all wildly self indulgent stuff with nods towards ethereal British folk, African high life, free jazz doodling and trippy camp-fire spirituals.
His press agents gamely summarise it all as "a wide spray of textures, dynamics and styles", a description I'm at a loss to improve upon.
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