The Heliocentrics
From the Deep

THE REVIEW

For some years, I was waiting for nothing else: a new album by Heliocentrics. I had long desired their name to stand alone on one of these dreamlike covers. Now, calmly, with this early 2016 release, I turn to you dear Malcolm Catto, squeeze out a bit of various collaborations, for a little while it's enough to act as session musicians and co-sign your studio deliriums with equally noble entities, because, you know, you must be left alone in your sinusoidal stream of consciousness and in your formless jams that have only done well to jazz and experimental music in ten years.

• Well done.
• Bravo.

Not considering the collaborative albums, From the Deep is their third LP, and I think it is futile to introduce again this conglomerate of incredible musicians, who better than others have managed to raise the bar of psychedelic jazz experiments. Therefore, an album born from the inclusion of jams performed at Quatermass Studios (virtually everything from Quatermass Sessions 1 is here) and tracks conceived alongside the producer Gaslamp Killer (Flying Lotus).

Ethnic grooves, assorted percussion, loosened double basses, delirious pianos, noir vibraphones, echoes, and pulses: the Heliocentrics logo is all well injected, enclosed as per rule in many elusive track-sketches. A puzzle composed of many small parts, 19 tracks mostly of short duration, like a tour de force near a black hole, where the instruments seem to walk through space between tense wires and surreal atmospheres.

Ice jungles among disparate musical galaxies, extraterrestrial jazz, and avant-garde psychedelic funk get lost and fade from their identity among innumerable contaminations: like other albums, this is a work on many depths, both in emotion and execution. Perhaps psychedelia weighs even more in the balance of their kaleidoscopic sounds, but mentally measuring the parts in this heterogeneous mass of totally free form tracks is certainly not easy. The Heliocentrics are a fluid that doesn't stagnate, music in which to drown, undoubtedly among my favorites of the last ten years.

For those who do not know them, at this point, I feel like recommending them in their entirety starting from any possible foothold available in this hallucinatory brew of flutes, clarinets, string instruments, abstract brushstrokes of electronics, psychedelia, funk, and experimental jazz. Uh. I’m happy to repeat what I wrote some time ago: Miles would be proud.

• (2007) Out There
• (2013) 13 Degrees of Freedom
• (2013) Quatermass Sessions 1