ELECTRIC SILENCE

The knockout third Dzyan album is an addictive combination of instrumental playing with trippy experimental elements, contrasting earthy aspects with deep space and beyond. `Electric Silence' has a strong eastern raga-rock sound, utilizing the sitar and other ethnic percussion instruments, with more typical progressive Mellotron and even German styled electronics. Some parts of it would appeal to fans of the darker jammy King Crimson tracks that appeared on their seventies albums, or raga-rock albums like the early Kebnekaise ones. The bass playing has a murky swallowing sound, the drumming violent and guitar play ragged and wild! It's an album of delicate subtlety and intense outbursts.

`Back To Where We Came From' opens with bubbling electronics, marimbas, tension-building almost tribal percussion, then floating bass and groovy guitar that weaves through the piece. It's a slow burner like much of the album as it gradually builds in mood and form, with the band really taking off in the second half. `A Day In My Life' is an Indian styled tornado of sitar and tambura with harsh electronics that quickly builds in urgency. The darker and more eerie free-form `The Road Not Taken' has disorientating effects, tuneless jagged guitar stabs, chaotic and furious drum-work and creeping bass lurking amongst the track.

Spacey raga piece `Khali' is a deeply hypnotic Mellotron/sitar duet, with a rising electric guitar solo drifting among the background. Very immersive and easy to become lost in. The more experimental and fusion styled `For Earthly Thinking' has a slightly sinister opening, with impossibly hard, deep drawn out bass notes and fiery jazzy guitar play, before maddening steel drums and heavy percussion whip up a storm. It finally collapses into an addictive mess of suffocating and exhausting noise! The title track is a jazz flavored heavy guitar and stormy drum workout with lots of jamming and soloing. It gives the last minutes of the album a fitting finale, a real showcase to the talented band members, but it's way too short and seems to fade out too abruptly with the band still in full flight. The album barely runs 37 minutes, so time constraints was not an issue.

`Electric Silence' sounds quite different than the previous album `Time Machine'. That one also had the Indian/ethnic elements, but they were on separate tracks altogether to the alternating guitar heavy and atonal jazzy experimentations, resulting in a strangely unbalanced (although addictive!) album. Here, however, all those elements are blended together, resulting in a better realized and varied vision. The band certainly captured a very original and imaginative sound. The two albums are available on a single CD, outstanding value considering both of them are superb.

A truly inventive spiritual and spacey Krautrock stunner, `Electric Silence' is an intoxicating mixture of progressive rock, world music and psychedelic atmosphere, music to truly become lost in.

Thanks to Doug and John for the recommendation in the first place!