COSMICDOOM.COM
On The Dark Path to Spiritual Expansion, The Elemental Chrysalis somehow manages to be both epic and understated at the same time. With eight tracks spanning nearly two hours, this two-disc set of mostly acoustic, slow-moving folk is not easily digested in one sitting.
The shortest track clocks in at just over seven and a half minutes, while “Grey Like a Moon Underneath Waves of Storms... Her Shroud Falls Faint as a Clouded Embrace” comes in at just under 27 minutes, which is about how long it takes to say the song title out loud. Even the packaging is epic, with an oversized, double-gatefold cover featuring artwork by James Woodhead, one half of the Elemental Chrysalis.
Despite all the excesses in packaging, song titles and length, the music itself is sparse and moody. Acoustic guitars plod slowly along, often backed by environmental sounds like chirping birds or falling rain. Lyrics are few and far between, and they’re usually delivered as whispers or ethereal chants. Listing all of the instruments used on the album would require more bandwidth than I’ve been allotted for this review, but many of them (Indian horse hide tympani, Birch fog whistle, energy chimes) sound like something you’d buy at the Renaissance Fair after one too many pints of mead.
The Elemental Chrysalis is certainly not for everyone, but if you’re looking for a way to impress your friends at the next coven, The Dark Path to Spiritual Expansion might be right up your alley.
HEATHEN HARVEST
Our first experience with this pagan expressionism called The Elemental Chrysalis, an act coming from USA in the head of two spirits Ruhr Hunter (Chet W. Scott) who is the main force behind Glass Throat Recordings and At The Head Of The Woods (James Woodhead), Mr Scott has been developing his skills as a composer, performer, and producer of sound ritual crafting for many years. And now under The Elemental Chrysalis, he & partner James perform a very interesting musical concept. This exploration & unique incoming of many audible threads, creates the original sound that has become an in deep piece of psychedelic folk music. With so many sticking elements here and there, which complements perfectly with the concept handled by both individuals through this album.
The earth tongues have been consumed & with this, the mighty path of an elemental chrysalis becomes more clear. Onward through the door of a wooded heart, the chrysalis gift transcending, organic acoustic doom compositions & rich analog organ ritualism. With the guided energies of winter season, through the elder pacific north western woodlands, the mournful heart seeks comfort & cleansing in these times of blackened skies. "The dark path to spiritual expansion” is more than just a musical album, it's an amalgam of beautiful melodies twisting themselves to enrapture the nature spirit converging itself to release all its powerful energy to the listener.
The album comes in a beautiful green duo tone digipack including two cds, the first, “collection one” develops 4 compositions with a very in deep musicianship based into acoustic guitar elements, which are built in a dedicated way. The whole tracks are sublime in its own essence. At some moments enchanting vocal evocations are bring to complement the addictive musical expression created here. The last track “the dark path to spiritual expansion” is brilliant and includes so many instruments such as 8ight string Greek Bouzouki, piano, cello, violin, thunder gong, tubular bells among others. So this is a masterpiece due the essence of how is created and which this track transmit when hearing so carefully.
While the 2nd cd “collection two” includes also 4 compositions, and the opening track "Our limbs your shelter…” is the entrance to realms of mother nature, bird songs, atmospheres and acoustic guitar tunes floating in a very impressive way, and so each one of the tracks continues their majestic, nostalgic step deep inside its arms, coz mother nature has so many element to explore. Sometimes the whole track has such blues/psych folk elements and voices which are worth to explore when hearing. Epic visual totems unfold with every breath! Seekers of today’s true eclectic underground will find faith once again. A purely psychedelic headphone crafting!
JUDAS KISS
The Elemental Chrysalis is a Seattle-based collaborative project consisting of Chet W. Scott and James Woodhead. Chet Scott has also recorded with Your Cell: Yourself, Triage and Blood Of The Black Owl formerly known as Svart Ugle, but he is perhaps best known for his solo ritual ambient project Ruhr Hunter. James Woodhead also records as At The Head Of The Woods. The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is their second release, following 2005s debut The Calocybe Collection, also released on Chet Scott's label Glass Throat Recordings. The duo's sound has evolved since their debut release, with much of the drone that dominated The Calocybe Collection stripped away to reveal a sparse folk sound, more precise and less numinous, but no less revelatory. As with The Calocybe Collection, though, The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is beautifully presented in an oversized gatefold sleeve, ravishingly adorned with James Woodhead's mesmerizingly intricate pencil drawings. The front cover, printed in black on sage green, depicts a gnarled and ancient tree trunk with a door in it. Let's knock on that door and seek admittance to the enchanted kingdom of The Elemental Chrysalis...
The Dark Path... is an epic undertaking, a two-CD collection, with each disc containing four tracks adding up to around an hour. The songs range between seven and 27 minutes in length, and are largely instrumental, although vocals appear here and there. Song titles have the same tendency towards length as the songs themselves. The longest one on here is disc two's "Grey Like A Moon Underneath Waves Of Storms, Her Shroud Falls Faint As A Clouded Embrace", although "Hehaka" weighs in at a skinny six letters. The Elemental Chrysalis is evidently not making a bid for the affections of those with short attention spans or no time to spare – this music demands quiet, leisurely, absorption. A very wide variety of instruments are used on The Dark Path..., which are mostly acoustic and include bouzouki, piano, cello violin, ocarina, psaltery, dulcimer and wooden flute, as well as the guitars which provide the musical bedrock of The Elemental Chrysalis. Several different analogue electric organs are used, but obvious synth work and digital electronics are avoided, at most being used for background ambience. The result is a dry, introspective folky music with obvious nods to the psychedelic folk of the late 60s and early 70s, including bands such as The Incredible String Band, Comus and The Strawbs, albeit refracted through an aesthetic sensibility which takes account of later musical developments such as dark ambient and doom and black metal.
Disc one opens with the 23-minute instrumental "In Through A Desert Door Of A Wooded Heart", which is based around a plucked acoustic guitar melody, sparingly accented with percussion and a deeper electric guitar which chimes in on certain notes. The guitar notes reverberate out into a spacious soundscape, with spectral background atmospherics appearing at around the 14-minute mark. Later in the song, a farfisa organ swirls in the background behind the guitars. The next track, "Procession Of Burning Flowers" is the shortest of the collection, and both faster and noisier. Again, the melody is carried by acoustic guitar, but there is a lot of background noise, including waves of drones, discordant whistles and mumbled, wordless vocals, giving this track an almost dark ambient feel, as opposed to the folk stylings of the first. "Hehaka" features the album's first lyrics, delivered by James Woodhead in a clear, clean style, as well as some of the deep shamanic throat singing that Chet Scott also put to good use on Ruhr Hunter's Moss & Memory (also reviewed on Judas Kiss). "Hehaka" is less guitar-driven than the previous tracks, with the track being based on brooding, doom-laden organ interspersed with wistful, echoing flute notes like the baying of distant wolves.
The final track on disc one is the album's title track, "The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion", and it's a real masterpiece. Whilst Glass Throat label releases in general, and Ruhr Hunter and Elemental Chrysalis in particular, are usually associated with the forest landscapes of the Pacific Northwest region where the label is based, "The Dark Path..." is an evocation of pure, timeless prairie vastness, unmistakably American, with strummed guitar notes bending upwards and lending a countrified feel to the song, scouring winds whipping across the background and James Woodhead's lyrics delineating a lonely spiritual quest. Here, the evolution of The Elemental Chrysalis' music parallels that of their Seattle neighbors Earth, who made a similar progression from epic dark drone to the minimalist Americana of their 2005 album Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method. If The Elemental Chrysalis want to develop this aspect of their music further (and they should, its great), I have a couple of practical suggestions. One is that they acquire a banjo. The other is that they get tiMOTHy of Crow Tongue (also reviewed on Judas Kiss) to guest on banjo on their next album. Either way, songs like this cry out for a banjo. In fact, I actually thought there was a banjo on this song, but checking the sleeve notes, there doesn't seem to be, so I guess it must be a guitar with a capo on it. Why don't other big, empty countries, like Australia, say, or Mongolia, produce music like this? Or maybe they do, and I just haven't heard it. In any case, it's impossible to listen to "The Dark path..." without envisioning dusty windswept plains, big skies and hazy horizons.
And so on to disc two, which opens with the birdsong, plucked guitar and long, mournful organ notes of "Our Limbs Your Shelter... Our Roots Your Den". After the spellbinding introductory passage, a mouth organ sounds a repeated phrase of three notes. The vocals are delivered in a sibilant channel-shifting whisper, with sudden, startling bursts of tambourine adding to the impression that a rattlesnake is singing.
The next track is the monumental "Grey Like A Moon Underneath Waves Of Storms... Her Shroud Falls Faint As A Clouded Embrace", which opens with the sound of forest rainfall, thunder and hesitant flute notes, which gradually cohere and coalesce into a droning, sacral harmony, with distant, spectral cries and shrieks creating unease and dread. There's a definite funereal feeling to this song, and I was specifically reminded of Wolfmangler's similarly sombre "Dirge For A Viking Asshole". The middle section of "Grey Like A Moon..." is dominated by organ and a muted drum maintaining a steady tribal rhythm, later supplemented with shivering, keening violin and rasping, black metal style vocals. The song attains a measure of placidity in it's closing minutes, with piano and soft, caressing guitar licks bringing calm and solace after the necromantic frenzy. "A Banshee's Blackened Wail" [sic] returns to the sparse country rock of the title track ( in fact, I'm pretty sure it's a reprise of the same tune), with banshee wails provided by Rachel Boaz-Scott, Chet Scott's wife and the visual designer of Glass Throat. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time she's appeared on a Glass Throat recording. The album's closing track, "Jeweled Blue Waters Of A Slumbering Ocean", is a quiet and minimal lullaby, being based around a gently melancholy piano underpinned by low horns and the soothing lapping of waves on a moonlit shoreline.
All Glass Throat releases have more similarities than differences, with a distinctive house style being apparent. There's a deep attachment to the natural world, old-fashioned devotion to craftsmanship, painstaking attention to visual and aural detail, and a prevailing atmosphere of melancholy. I tend to think of these recordings as coming in different shades of black, with Ruhr Hunter being darker, The Elemental Chrysalis being lighter, and Alethes (also reviewed on Judas Kiss) being somewhere in the middle. (Chet Scott's other band, Blood Of The Black Owl, is darkest of all, but BOTBO releases appear on Bindrune Recordings rather than Glass Throat.) If you like one Glass Throat release, you're likely to find the others rewarding listening also. The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is arguably the label's largest and most ambitious undertaking yet, and although my personal favorite remains Ruhr Hunter's Moss & Memory, the musicianship and compelling atmospheres of The Dark Path... make it very worthwhile. The country rock inflections of tracks like "Hehaka", the title track and "A Banshee's Blackened Wail" in particular are an exciting new development, whilst the dolorous mood of "Grey Like A Moon..." lingers in the memory like a half-remembered nightmare. - Simon Collins
The long awaited return of one of my favorite woodland doom folk duos, the Elemental Chrysalis, which features Chet Scott of Ruhr Hunter, Glass Throat Recordings and shamanic sludge metal project Blood Of The Black Owl, and James Woodhead from At The Head Of The Woods. Their previous album The Calocybe Collection from 2005 was one of my favorite albums from Chet's Glass Throat imprint, a dark mystical descent into a shadowy forest world filled with droning acoustic guitars and deep baritone voices that floated over moss-covered stones and through huge ancient trees that blotted out the sun. It's been three years since that album first graced my ears, but their followup The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is even more dark and beautiful and doomy, a massive two-disc double album with long epic songs, sometimes stretching out twenty minutes or longer. Each disc containing four songs, the whole set packaged in a gorgeous six-panel oversized gatefold sleeve, a breathtaking package illustrated with amazing artwork of an ancient tree with a wooden door surrounded by smaller trees, knotted and covered in mushrooms, their limbs weaved together to create the name The Elemental Chrysalis. Inside, an evocative photo of a twilight mountainscape looming high over a huge lake. All of it printed in dark green and black. And the interior filled with lyrics, liner notes and album credits, and each disc mounted onto the sleeve on a rubber nub.
Where the first album was a drifting forestscape of acoustic strum and deep drones, the music is now a dark, slow moving folk sound, with a rich acoustic guitar as the focal instrument. Each plucked string and scraped pick is fully rendered, filling the space around each song with deep ringing notes and the drifting decay of buzzing strings. The album opens with "In Through A Desert Door Of A Wooded Heart", and for most of it's twenty minutes consists of a rich dark melody played over and over, completely hypnotizing, eventually joined by deep rumbles, the hum of hazy Farfisa organ, a male voice intoning wordless vocals, spacey keyboards, the song stretching out and wandering through a gorgeous field of ghostly ambience. Distorted doomy guitars drift deep underneath the folk, but are always just on the periphery, a subtle rumbling presence. The tracks that follow are similarly grim and beautiful and trance inducing, the acoustic guitar alternately joined by other instruments and sounds like bouzouki, cello, violins, piano, field recordings of woodland sounds, bells and gong, tympani drums, and the ancient traditional sounds of dulcimer and ocarina, psaltery and celestaphone. The Elemental Chrysalis take me back to the seventies folk of The Wicker Man soundtrack and the witchy music of Comus, but with an oh-so-subtle undercurrent of heavy ambient darkness. So beautiful and mysterious and grim, with bits of almost electronic sounding keening tones that reminds me of the rural dread conveyed in the original film score for Jeff Lieberman's backwoods dread classic Just Before Dawn. Slow, creeping forest twang, doomy and dark, the vocals a perfect combination of deep chanting and soft baritone singing, creepy throat singing and ghostly wails. The Elemental Chrysalis have never let me down, but I was still blown away by how amazing this album is, an organic, autumnal funeral procession through untouched forests and ravines, psychedelic and lethargic, folky but massive. Highly recommended!!!
EVENING OF LIGHT
The duo of James Woodhead and Chet Scott is back with their second album, and a long journey it is, this time! The Dark Path to Spiritual Expansion is, like the title suggests, a long and dark musical peregrination, spread across two discs, each containing four tracks and an hour of music. On the journey, the main musical strain seems to be dark folk, but with this project, influences from ambient, blues, and even doom metal don't seem to be very far away.
The first Collection starts off with the very long "In Through a Desert Door...", which is based almost purely around slowly evolving guitar, bouzouki, and organ melodies. In a track like this, one can draw a parallel to some funeral doom metal, like perhaps an acoustic version of Mournful Congregation. Actually, this track is quite comparable to the opener of the debut album: long, but good. "Procession of Burning Flowers" is a nice 'short' piece, based mainly around bluesy guitar, later embellished with nice percussion and vocal samples. "Hehaka" starts slow, with a dark and subtle ambient intro, but including a heavy skin drum in the background. After a couple of minutes, the main guitar melody kicks in - kind of bluesy, with a typical folky touch as well. The vocals on this track are also quite nice. The title track is also one of the better tracks on the album. Even though it's completely based on one repeated bouzouki melody, it doesn't get boring; rather, it's simply utterly hypnotizing as you're drawn into the dark journey described in the lyrics.
The second collection begins in a way similar to the first one, though "Our Limbs..." is somewhat shorter than the opening track of the whole album. The main track, and heftiest piece of the album is the excellent "Grey Like a Moon...". Clocking in at nearly 27 minutes, it's quite something to take in, but that won't daunt the experienced listener, I guess. From a subtle ambient woodwind intro (reminds me quite positively of Far Black Furlong), the track launches into an epic ritual of skin drum percussion, organ drones and pleading faint vocals. It swells and swells, adding some excellent dark strings into the mix as well. After the track climaxes, the last quarter of it or so is a beautiful calm part with bass, strings and electric guitar. The third track is one of the shorter ones, based on the lyrics about the Banshee, but also featuring guest Banshee vocals by Chet's wife (and packaging designer!) Rachel. The final track is also deserving of particular mention though: a beautiful piece of drifting ambient with excellent interplay between piano, drones and sea samples.
While I feel the album might drag a tiny bit in some places, it's impressive how these two men manage to make an album last two hours and be interesting and fulfilling at the same time. The vast variety of instruments and sounds give the music a great aural detail, and although those with short attention spans will most likely not be digging this, any experimental music lover worth his or her salt will want to check this one out. There's still room for improvement, but there's no doubt in my mind that The Elemental Chrysalis are heading for more greatness. 8/10
AQUARIUS RECORDS
Finally, the return of the Elemental Chrysalis, the duo of Chet Scott (aka Ruhr Hunter, he also runs Glass Throat Recordings) and James Woodhead, who were responsible for The Calocybe Collection, one of our favorite discs of 2005. A sprawling woodlandscape of dark ominous dronemusick and fluttery forest folk. It's been 3 years but once you hear The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion, you'll understand what took so long.
A gorgeously packaged double disc set, looooooong tracks, four songs on each disc, the shortest clocking in at 7:32, the longest at 26:55. Gone is much of the drone, leaving their sound much more folky, the focus on the strings, plucked and strummed, buzzing and humming, the sound a mysterious mystical crawl, foresty, funereal, dark and dolorous and dreamlike. The first nearly 15 minutes of the opening track consist of the same acoustic melody, repeated over and over, like some magical mantra, and it works somehow, the repetition trancelike, the subtle variations, propelling the track forward. Eventually, the track spreads out, the vocals ghostly moans, the strums become more abstract, the sound underpinned by haunting shimmers and whirs. While these guys do get lumped in with the free folk or freak folk of forest folk movements, on The Dark Path, they are definitely something more akin to classic seventies folk. It could be some lost disc from a mysterious UK hippy commune in 1971. Opening for Comus and The Incredible String Band. This is some serious Wickerman shit. But without all the silliness or overt weirdness. The Elemental Chrysalis have created timeless folk music. A sort of foresty country music. Bits of twang definitely inform the band's dark wistful threnodies. The pace is lugubrious, the sound is sprawling and soporific, the voices drawled to the extent that they often sound like just another instrument. And the instrument list again is extensive and massive, a handful we'd never even heard of, but the band don't do the usual, everything and the kitchen sink, instead, they are employed subtly and judiciously, so much that you could be forgive for believing it to be just voice and guitar and a bit extra ambience. There are a few moments, especially on the second disc, where the band stretch out and craft some serious sonic soundscapes, but even then, they tend to drift above that same gorgeous forest floor folk flutter.
A gorgeously languorous countrified folk flecked slow core, that will no doubt appeal to all the various folks mentioned above, but should also appeal to fans of later Earth, and anyone into dark beauty and haunting musical mystery. Fantastic packaging, an oversized thick card stock 6 panel fold over sleeve, green and black, stunning cover art, liner notes and credits, the cds mounted on nubs on two of the panels.
MUSIQUE MACHINE
This is the second epic release from his dark folk/ ambience/ prog/ forest bound instrumental music duo consisting of multi instrumentalists Chet Scott (Ruhr Hunter, Blood of The Black Owl) & Guitarist James Woodhead (At the Head of the Woods)- it's Really an album of two sonic tales or journeys offering up two hour long disks that create their own audio place and environment.
Disk one or as it's named collection one shows the more acoustic and stripped down facets of the project and really works as one long sonic trip even though it's split into 4 tracks, a lot of sound and melody themes are repeated and revisited, giving the feeling like a jounery on a certain path. It all starts off with In through the desert Door of a Woodern Heart- which is built around doomy church like organ patterns, acoustic guitars and what sounds like banjo. It last near on 25 minutes and I'm afraid to say it just seems to go round and round in sonic circles with little reward or atmosphere- I can see what's been trying to be done, but it just feels wrong and often awkward with discordant cords here and there too.
Thankfully after the poor and ineffectual opener it gets a lot better and really goes from strength to strength (for the most part). Track two Procession of Burn flowers is simply hauntingly beautiful with it's rich dark acoustic country twang & with growing in the background darkness and malevolent ambience and a mix of forest male speaking in tongue & mournful female crying. Ending the first disk is the title track which reintroduces some of the melodies and harmonics from the first track, but this time around it feels much richer and atmospheric cutting all the discordant or bum notes out, it also introduces singing- which is a first for the project and is done in a sombre mumble that fits the tracks mournful yet heroic air well.
Disk two or collection two is the album and the quality of material I was expecting from this duo after their first releases together The Calocybe Collection (which still stands as one of my favourite releasers of the last 5 years). The music here is still stripped down in places but through out it just seems so much more emotional, deep and atmospheric- it also sees the return of interesting and unexpected sonic twists and turns in the music(which were all but missing on Collection one) and also the reappearance of vocals.
There is not one mis-step with-in collection two, so it's hard to pick a favourite as each track has its own tangible and involving atmosphere- But If pushed I'd say the epic in title and length Grey Like A Moon Underneath the wave of Storm... her Shroud falls faint as a Clouded Embrace- which starts off with the sound of forest downpour and melancholy/ eerier flute weaves, then builds to tribal drum, organ, rain sound and echoed vocal march that is so hypnotically beautiful it just sucks you deeper and deeper into the tracks rich sorrowful heart, latter on haunting violin/ strings add even more grim wonder. If you shut your eyes your starting out onto a forest glade in late autumn early winter as solemn gowned figures appear carrying a casket of oak and vine that's to be placed in the harden ground for it's place of rest and decay- from the earth we come & to the earth we return. The piece finshers with an doomy, mournfully & beautiful piano and violin march that crawls to near stand still and your complete and utterly lost in it's sonic sombre and beautiful air- simply spellbinding stuff .
So an album that unfortunately sits rather lopsided with me- with the first disk been uneven & at times very lackluster (mainly because of the first track) and a second disk that shows the pair performing at the height of their powers, creating some of the most emotional and atmospheric music I've heard. Certainly worth a look if you brought the first album & if not buy the first album first then progress on this it's more difficult counterpart. - 4 of 5 kudos
THE SHADOWS COMMENCE
Hmm, where should I begin? This is a huge work. Not kidding. The first thing that I got stuck on was the layout, so that's where I'll begin. The layout is amazing. The colors, the cover art, the design of the packaging in general...That alone should persuade you to get this album right away. You can gaze at it for hours and still recognize new things. But of course, that's standard when it comes to a CD released by Glass Throat Records. This album, "The Dark Path to Spiritual Expansion" is the second offering from the two gentlemen Chet Scott (RUHR HUNTER et cetera) and James Woodhead (AT THE HEAD OF THE WOODS, A MINORITY OF ONE et cetera) under the moniker THE ELEMENTAL CHRYSALIS. The 8 tracks are spread out on two CDs, and the only reasonable reason to do so is to make them fit, because these tracks are very long. The intro alone is reaching well over 20 minutes, and the rest are usually around 10-15 each. The second track on the second CD though, has a playing time at almost 30 minutes, so you might understand that this ain't no easy listening stuff we're talking about. Contrary. This requires quite a lot from the listener in order to deliver what it holds. Just like the debut album, we do get lots of instruments, guitars on top, other stringed instruments, flutes, chimes, organs, various percussion, voice experiments and some regular singing as well. For me, when I compare these two albums, I do get quite the same vibes. Sound-wise, their pretty close but this one could maybe lean more to the bluesy side. But of course, with a total length over 2 hours, there's pretty much going on but it's always very mellow and mysterious and always very interesting. The long tracks are mainly instrumental, 5 of them do have vocals but they pass quite unnoticed by due to the thick music wall. With that said, I do not wish to make you think that the vocals are superfluous in any way, because they ain't. If you focus you'll discover that they are actually very nice, be they dark murmurings, throat singing or the lovely chants of Rachel, Chet's wife who can be heard in the third track on CD 2 - probably one of the strongest tracks, but the competition is strong! Every track has something to offer. At first, I though I wouldn't like the bluesy sound at all, usually I don't, but it's done with such accuracy and power I fell headlong.
Some further recommendations for the curious; the intro, for sure. This long piece of sad folk acoustics will sweep you away, guarantied. It sets the mood of the album and it sounds fabulous. Also, don't miss "Jewelled Blue Waters of a Slumbering Ocean", a sad, yet beautiful piano composition ought to pierce both heart and soul.
Yes, "The Dark Path to Spiritual Expansion" is a great deep work of art, with 8 tracks of organic psychedelia, blues riffs, ambient passages and crestfallen folk music experimentation. Original it is, and Chet and James are truly great artists. This creation is probably the closest thing to a moist autumnally forest that has ever poured out of my speakers, it's huge. AND it looks so good. Hats off.
