experimental ambient spaces, a journey of the mind

One of the greatest things about the psychedelic community is the wide variety of unique do-it-yourself artists and musicians who populate the scene. Holistic artists like these typify the values of the renaissance creators, blending philosophy, technology, music, and art into a tidy package of alchemical sound and vision, handily compatible with any home CD player and guaranteed to stimulate any set of eyes and ears the planet.

One such renaissance musician is pfly, also known as Paul Fly. pfly has been producing underground ambient and experimental tracks for years now, but with Duckapus, his latest release, he has taken the art form to a new level. Every snippet of sound on this CD was assembled from the ground up by Fly, mixed and mastered in his own home studio. Even the curiously enfractaled art on the CD sleeve comes from his desktop, making the entire package a start-to-finish holographic representation of pfly's head space.

Duckapus is a very strange and unique album, moving through lush organic spaces, squeaking dissociative noise machinery, and churning caverns of dark mystical power, each one bubbling over with the potential to explode into states of pure chaos at any moment. The mind states flow seamlessly from one to other, some leaving you in the warm folds of sonic bliss, others sending you spiraling into darkness, others spinning your awareness forty-five degrees in space while simultaneously giving your light vehicle a two-and-a-half minute lube and tune.

Whether you're being pounded by hammers of insanity or washed over with electro-harmonic love plasma, the great joy of this album is never knowing where you're going to end up next. Some transitions are organic and exotic, others creep out of nowhere and take control, others pass you through hellish corridors of torment before alighting you into a field of fresh wild flowers at sunrise. Duckapus leaves you with the sensation that a grand dreamlike voyage has been undertaken, a skittering surreal journey through the many joys and pains of existence. Duckapus is also an immaculately crafted album, each passage deep and complex with simultaneous unfolding and enfoldment of mood and sound. In short it is a production tour de force, and certainly has the depth to listen to over and over again, always discovering new glittering snippets and pieces, like tiny polished gems awash in a great ocean of sound.