Julie's Haircut
Ashram Equinox

The mutation, which began with “After Dark, My Sweet" and continued with the beautiful double album “Our Secret Ceremony”, a small compendium of unorthodox psychedelic rock with clear krautrock influences, is completed in this “Ashram Equinox”, the ideal closure of this trilogy of change for the Reggio Emilia band Julie's Haircut.

The push towards the rarefaction of sounds, the reiteration of rhythmic patterns, preferring open and atmospheric structures, already largely present in the second LP of "Our Secret Ceremony", is fully embraced here, giving life to 8 instrumental tracks, where the voice is reduced to an environmental element, succeeding in the difficult task of summing up many facets of the krautrock prism.

Truly skilled in avoiding any prolixity, managing to convey their idea of devotional music in 40 minutes. Indeed, although very different, this mystical version of Julie's Haircut strongly recalls the musical approach of the American band OM. Everything, or nearly everything, is played on bass and drum foundations, over which analog keyboards are grafted, sometimes leading to cosmic dub pulsations (“Johin”), other times to eastern ambient recesses (“Equinox”), not too subtly honoring Terry Riley (“Taotie”) until it brushes against modern “classical” in “Ashram”.

You’ve already understood this is a record meant for attentive, or at least interested, listening, given the risk of it becoming a hypnotic background for your daily tasks. A serious mistake, it could easily be dismissed as a pretentious and onanistic tribute to the fashionable German cosmic rock.

Instead, “Ashram Equinox” walks confidently on its own, made of cosmic dust and hymns to its own “inner space”; it asks for a bit of attention but rewards you with an interesting dose of endorphins.