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A fever dream of psyche-pastorals and intoned ritual songs. Slowly evolving experimental drone music that references the devotional chants of West Coast cults and Appalachian hymns.
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TRACK LIST
Side A ( inward she turns her feathered hand / western grave / peace, my constant prayer / charmed of lesser beasts )
Side B ( jhonn ghoul / landscape is body is light / tremors of a miracle / night claims / a place the water can be cold )
CREDITS
Recorded by M. Anderson and A. Parks Spring 2024-Spring 2025
Side A ( inward she turns her feathered hand / western grave / peace, my constant prayer / charmed of lesser beasts )
Side B ( jhonn ghoul / landscape is body is light / tremors of a miracle / night claims / a place the water can be cold )
CREDITS
Recorded by M. Anderson and A. Parks Spring 2024-Spring 2025
REVIEWS
After a handful of digital and cassette-only releases, this duo of Mkl Anderson (Drekka) & Adam Parks (lightning white bison) celebrate the project’s vinyl debut with their finest album to date. Coincidentally, it is also the duo’s first properly co-written/co-produced studio recording, as the project began its life as a long-distance collaboration. While the pair describe Water Is The Sun’s aesthetic as “an alchemical amalgam of their primary projects,” Ritual Fever feels like an entirely unique and inspired vision compared to their previous work, as they weave together the “devotional chants of West Coast cults and Appalachian hymns” with more experimental and drone-based sounds to land somewhere that blurs the lines between the haunted traditional music channelings of backwoods Americana Dead Can Dance and the more occult/psychotropic drone side of Coil.
Notably, Anderson and Parks intended Ritual Fever as “a fully realized work” that they planned to perform in its entirely during their live sets and that intent is very much reflected in its structure, as each side is essentially presented as a longform piece with a number of named sections that all blur into one another. Evidently the instrumentation was a mixture of “old tape machines, keyboards and field-/found-recordings,” but that “found recordings” part of that equation is doing a hell of a lot of the heavy lifting, as the central motif in many passages is usually a chanted or sung motif. While the character of those vocals can range from ghostly choral samples to droning ritualistic chants to rustic-sounding village choirs, the one unifying theme seems to be a sense of shimmering unreality and elusive meaning, as they are frequently buried deep in the mix and stretched, reversed, and looped in impressively hypnotic and psychotropic fashion.
While those hallucinatory vocal loops are often the melodic focus, much of the album’s structure is provided by minimal organ/synth/harmonium chord progressions along with an occasional stretch of slow-motion ritualistic percussion. In fact, I would describe Ritual Fever as an endlessly evolving balancing act between timeless, rustic, and haunted-sounding samples and alternately understated and epic-sounding synthesizer motifs, but there is also some wonderfully warped and gnarly sound processing in the mix as well. The overall impression is akin to listening to a slowly burning synth album haunted by strains of traditional music that sensuously drift in and out of focus (along with some occasional bits of heavy weather in the form of passing noise maelstroms or spacey sprays of laser-like synth sounds).
The cover art nails that vibe especially well, as there is a timeless beauty and innocence at the core of these pieces, but it also seems like those children may have inadvertently awakened a slumbering extra-dimensional horror lurking beneath the swaying wheat fields. Or perhaps the psychic residue of an idyllic imagined past has begun to bleed into the troubled dreams of the present. In any case, this is a pretty fucking mesmerizing headphone album and it seems to be tapped into the same “back to the land” zeitgeist as recent works by Weirs, Old Saw, and Pacific Walker (albeit definitely more on the “lost recordings of a doomed utopian commune” side of that spectrum).
- Psychotropic Wonderland
With “Ritual Fever,” Water Is The Sun—the collaborative project of Mkl Anderson (Drekka) and Adam Parks (Timber Rattle, Lightning White Bison)—present an impressive album best understood as a cohesive, almost initiatory whole, oscillating between soundtrack, meditative sonic ritual, and imaginary landscape paintings in the twilight. Analog recording techniques, tape loops, field recordings, and a clear affinity for ritual and folkloric forms of expression merge into music that refuses to be broken down into individual tracks, instead appearing as an ongoing process, a constantly shifting state between shaping and dissolution.
Right from the start, a subtle, underlying drone gives rise to a kind of sonic mist. It gurgles and hisses, as if a thin, transparent membrane lay over everything. From this emerges something that sounds like singing – high-pitched, ethereal, almost intangible. Whether it's samples or distorted voices remains deliberately ambiguous within the shadowy song structure, which we'll encounter again and again throughout the album. This very ambiguity, along with a seemingly deliberate sonic blur, contributes significantly to the music's fascination: sounds seem to stabilize in the ear rather than actually in the physical space. What initially appears as a diffuse drone gradually takes on more synthetic contours without ever losing its delicacy.
As the album progresses, the textures become denser. Noisy details become more pronounced, almost physically palpable, while associations with natural sounds – the buzzing of insects, wind, distant movements that are difficult to define – creep in. Transitions occur organically, almost imperceptibly. Once again, ethereal vocal fragments emerge, their otherworldly quality evoking memories of ritual or sacred music. Beneath them simmers an electronic foundation, lending the whole a subtle unease. By the time the first melodic fragments begin to appear, the listener has long since been drawn into a hypnotic state, which at times also contains more abrupt, almost noisy textures. Within this flow, moments of folk-tinged, ritually tinged tranquility repeatedly open up. The sound material begins to stagger, wobble, and shimmer, as if looking through a shaky film frame. Ethereal chants give way to choral passages that sound as if from another time or sphere. Then, monotonous, archaic-sounding timpani enter, shifting the movement once more. Voices appear and disappear, sounding as if played backward or declaimed from afar, while the drone increasingly comes to the fore, no longer perceived as mere background noise.
Later, this impression intensifies: organ-like drones meet liturgical-sounding vocals, creating something akin to a sacred space. Yet even here, the duo resists any definitive definition: instead of a climax, there is more of a slow exhalation. The ending feels relaxed, almost weightless, reducing the means and releasing the listener into a state of tranquility, in which this album, which is meant to be experienced rather than understood, finds its conclusion.
- African Paper (translated from German)
WATER IS THE SUN (USA) is a collaborative project by Mkl Anderson (DREKKA) and Adam Parks (TIMBER RATTLE / LIGHTNING WHITE BISON). They create dark, ritualistic ambient music using tape loops, keyboards, vocals, and field recordings.
In forty-four minutes, divided into two twenty-two-minute pieces, WATER IS THE SUN composes a work where folklore, drone, and experimentation coexist within a powerful force field, maintaining the stability and coherence of their music. This duo seems to hold a powder rich in magical powers. A powder with rather dark hues to illustrate the strange feeling of walking on the hard-packed earth of certain African villages.
Ritual chants also contribute to this auditory journey, as does the use of percussion, which maintains this magical atmosphere in the sense of Voodoo magic. The loss of geographical bearings serves to disorient the listener. Because among all these rituals, some mystical elements transport me back to Europe; I often thought of Dead Can Dance in their way of blending pop, experimental sounds, and the sacred. Equally prominent is the influence of their compatriots in Coil, with their mysterious inner chanting, demanding melodies, and bewitching minimalism that only they know how to cultivate ('Charmed Of Lesser Beasts').
Harmoniums, organs, and synthesizers with minimal progressions create a slow, deliberate structure, while ceremonial percussion emerges at times to remind us that this music possesses both body and soul. Some very high-pitched voices conjured up the image of Charlemagne Palestine as he sings and sips his whiskey, dressed in his plaid shirt and sporting his bushy mustache (Side A / 13 mins...). The image is good-natured, but the generosity of these two musicians is very real, and it even gives an irresistible urge to quickly listen to the rest of this very first LP!
- STNT (translated from French)
Ritual Fever dives deeply into ritualistic influences; both the vocals, reminiscent of chants and mantras, and the earth-rattling sustained drones help send the listener into a trance, as if they were lying down in the middle of a field, waiting to ascend into a higher world.
As Water Is the Sun, the duo of Michael Anderson and Adam Parks, have produced their first fully collective effort, Ritual Fever. It is an aptly titled record, one that dives deeply into ritualistic influences; both the vocals, reminiscent of chants and mantras, and the earth-rattling sustained drones help send the listener into a trance, as if they were lying down in the middle of a field, waiting to ascend into a higher world. I do mean it that seriously, because the music is very captivating.There’s only two lengthy, multipart tracks on this tape, which helps settle an even deeper atmosphere. Side A, titled in its various segments as “inward she turns her feathered hand / western grave / peace, my constant prayer / charmed of lesser beasts,” is incredibly immersive. It is a fantastic blend of drones, altered vocal samples, and actual chants that will have you transcend into a different dimension. I mostly love how wonderfully the piece is structured, how massively it builds into its humongous drones. It starts off rather quietly, because even if drones are present initially, they’re rather smooth and, with some added effects, also very relaxing; after more than eight minutes of this wonderfully relaxing trance, the real journey begins: distant echoing hymns guide you as these gigantic drones make your eardrums wobble.
This part of the piece is genuinely phenomenal; the drones especially are so monstrous, overwhelmingly euphoric. The piece settles down afterwards, but the wonder continues; almost as if the ritual worked, you’re now submerged in soundscapes filled with distant reversed vocal samples, as though they were some sort of unintelligible memory, or as if the people around you had turned into another life-form.
The second piece (titled: “jhonn ghoul / landscape is body is light / tremors of a miracle / night claims / a place the water can be cold”) does not make me quite as ecstatic, but it still holds lots of sweet moments. I really appreciate the opening part, “johnn ghoul,” possibly the creepiest part of the record, as instead of sounding like a tribalistic ritual in a field, it feels like you’ve been forcefully dragged into a sect. Then follow rumbling timpani, more distorted vocal samples, and peace, at last. The center part of this track I find drags on a bit too much, as there’s no wow factor like there is on Side A, but the later segments offer some really nice ambience that dilutes the eerie atmosphere of the piece for a sweet finale.
Safe to say that this LP most definitely captured me, whether that was due to my own will or… to the will of some higher power. I hope that strange events or misfortunes won’t be happening in my room soon, because I’d be glad to replay this record and take on a bit of a journey. Side A is a must-listen for fans of this type of music, fans of the occult, or just fans of great music—they won’t be disappointed.
- Igloo Mag