After many months of absence from these pages whereupon in the meantime it was mooted one long evening around the Sunday Experience smoking lounge / pantry space beneath the stairs deep in conversational matters that we should cobble together a search party should he fail to report back by the turn of Summer. And then from out of nowhere news that he has broken cover and emerged from hibernation with a brace of must have releases. As ever with most of these Justin Wiggan / Roadside Picnic related releases there’s a bit of a back story attaching here. Stuck in Norway after air control had grounded flights due to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the advancing of an ash cloud, Mr Wiggan spent the next few days scouring flea markets for cassettes. On returning back to the UK an Icelandic friend sent over samples of volcanic ash as a memento of the occasion. Where are we going with this you might well ask, well strangely housed limited editions of Roadside Picnic and Dreams of Tall Buildings wares are not rare occurrences for there have been releases in mummified encasements, plaster blocks, credit cards, VHS videos, records locked and sandwiched between two heavy duty slabs of wood (and bolted no less) and USB sticks, this one by Mosaic of Teeth which incidentally finds Mr Wiggan collaborating with Nicholas Bullen of Nepalm Death fame along with various members of the Murmurists, Pan and two pale boys – arrives encased in a limited to 50 only phial of volcanic ash. Of course you don’t / can’t play the ash so inside there’s a download code. A novel idea you’d rightly think to yourself but I’m certain that Dreams of Tall Buildings toyed with similar limited edition formats / visual artefacts in their infancy. Enough of that and to the sounds within. To a strange procession of shimmering sitars at its opening, the Mosaic of Teeth set about crafting an unsettling wasteland of sound, a shamanic odyssey of dissipating Earthbeat collages and stilled Tibetan ceremonials prefaced by a bleak ritualistic eeriness that soon shape shifts into disturbing passages of nightmarish atmospherics to go all weird ear and trippy, certainly not feline friendly given that Dylan the house cat was most disagreeable and disturbed by the distinct sea change of tonalities around the 3.45 mark, in truth not as out there or as noise consuming as most RP releases that have come our way in recent years, the dream cycles, ethereal lulls and periods of busying sonic activity creating something of a meditative experience all said. http://www.bombshop.org/projects/mosaic-of-teeth/
