VH001 - Daniel Lea - Entheogen

ARTIST
DANIEL LEA

ALBUM TITLE
ENTHEOGEN

CATALOGUE NUMBER
VH001

ARTIST
DANIEL LEA

ALBUM TITLE
ENTHEOGEN

CATALOGUE NUMBER
VH001

As a collection of tracks Entheogen, Daniel Lea’s latest solo album (L A N D - Important Records, Heliochrysum - Bedroom Community and Cura Machines), charts a journey that is both visually and aurally kaleidoscopic, expanding and unfolding in a series of waypoints that just as they may threaten an overwhelming sensory cloudburst, they duck and shimmy just in time to allow the listener to come up for air, take a breath, before re-entering a new world. Or indeed, universe.

As such an hallucinatory musical journey it can be quite subtle, such as on f l o a t w i t h i n, which appears early along the album’s path: the shift from minor to major and back again is replete with subtle machines beeping as the track goes on to become stratospheric. On a track level, ‘Entheogen’ constantly shifts harmonic gears: two or three act structures burble and pulsate in Escheresque compositions.

There’s a constant restructuralization going on here, with the clue given in the album’s name itself: an entheogen is something used to alter the sense, often for ritualistic or sacred reasons. This is mirrored in the production itself: Lea’s analog synthesizers are heavily processed throughout via an array of effects, freeze-framing moments in time, creating a sonic language that paints a shifting spatial mosaic. The same sound palette is returned to over and over, with each process bringing a new end-point. Lea processed mainly through harmonizers, old reverbs, delay freezing, loop stations, working his way through Soundgas and their insane collection of analog devices, 636 reverbs, digitizers, denon pitch bending machines, infernal machines, static feedback, glitch devices, EMT reverbs, and even field recordings of space stations.

r o t o r announces itself with a somewhat asphyxiated choral burst, much like the ‘mechanical wheels’ or Hayot angels that come down from the sky in the Hebrew bible, before the track slowly grinds along in a mechanistic, propulsive build. The nod to techno also also evokes the fractal-elves of Terennce McKenna, or indeed referenced in the title of the track e n t i t i e s. The pitch and synth of the latter chime together under the spectral processed haze to mimic a pre-verbal conversation. This is music to visit other worlds not this one, populated by beings angel or elvish.

By the final track, p r o p h e t i c there is a warm amniotic case of sound, time itself has seemed to have dilated: a mild albeit abrupt homecoming that is also a finale, an almost spiritual recirculation.

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