Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti). While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique. Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold. In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).
This particular dream collaboration began exactly the same way as many other dream collaborations before it: Holy Tongue and Shackleton shared a bill at a festival and their mutual admiration led to plans to work together. In this case, the original idea was for Shackleton to remix an existing Holy Tongue song, but the scope happily blossomed into something much more interesting: Magaletti, Mukai, and Al Wootton recorded a bunch of raw new Holy Tongue material, handed it off to Shackleton, and gave him free rein to go hog wild with it. Speaking as someone who was absolutely mesmerized by Shackleton’s recent collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance, I can confidently say that “let Shackleton go absolutely bananas” tends to be a winning strategy and Tumbling Psychic Joy adds another instant classic to the pre-existing pile of supporting evidence.
That said, it did take me a handful of listens to fully grasp the visionary depth of this album, as I was initially frustrated by the shapeshifting nature of the beats and grooves. My early instinct was “these are just improvisations and jams that have been skillfully woven together,” as Tumbling Psychic Joy is bursting with great grooves and motifs that are never allowed to expand into a full song. Literally every song has at least a few passages that absolutely rule, but they are all ephemeral and invariably morph into something different rather than lingering and expanding.
The most prominent example of that phenomenon is “Blessed and Bewildered,” as it deceptively opens with a swinging disco thump before Magaletti’s erratic and shapeshifting high-hat patterns quickly steer the groove into far wonkier and more serpentine terrain. Along the way, the piece steadily accumulates subdued vibraphone melodies, smeared organ chords, warped trumpet skwonks, eerie flutes, wandering xylophone melodies, and burbling psychotropic weirdness en route to something that sounds like an improbably killer mash-up of Eva Luna-era Moonshake, Bitches Brew, and like four difference Stereolab songs filtered through Nurse With Wound-style surrealism. Put more concisely, it is one hell of a chameleonic mindfuck and the only real constant holding it all together is Mukai’s deep, dubwise bass. Notably, that piece is also something of a microcosm for the album as a whole, as Tumbling Psychic Joy feels like being led down a bottomless and deeply hallucinatory rabbit hole while guided only by a propulsive groove that itself is constantly transforming in character.
Once I realized that, the ingenious construction of the album finally clicked for me and I stopped lamenting that my favorite moments did not stick around and started loving how beautifully and organically the endlessly morphing groove burrowed into fresh realms of psychotropic bliss without ever lingering in familiar or predictable terrain. I was also struck by the sheer breadth of the various stylistic threads incorporated into Holy Tongue’s vision. Naturally, a heavy influence from Jamaican dub runs through everything, but that bedrock is continually mutated by shades of everything from Can to space age bachelor pad music to noirish Lydia Lunch-style jazz. For example, “The Merciful Lake” variously sounds like a field recording from a remote Tibetan temple, a sinuous contemporary espionage film soundtrack, and a very weird and proggy giallo soundtrack and it still finds room for a very cool and dubwise “spring reverb” interlude along the way. Elsewhere, the closing “Gravity Will Fail Us” incorporates a welcome Les Baxter-style exotica influence and evokes something that alternately lands between “Vicki Bennett teams up with a reggaeton/dembow producer” and “Sam Shackleton gets a DJ gig at a tiki bar.”
I could go into raptures about some of the wonderful individual sounds as well (trippy autoharp strums, loops that unpredictably slow, speed up, and pitch shift), but it makes more sense to just say that this whole fucking album is wonderfully immersive, deeply psychedelic, and vividly and vibrantly produced from start to finish. Given how much I dig the previous work of everyone involved, it was virtually inevitable that The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now would delight me, but I was still taken aback by much this album shot past my highest expectations. This is an absolutely stellar headphone album and easily one of the strongest releases in the discography of absolutely everyone involved.
