Magick Brother & Mystic Sister

Discovering the music of this Spanish duo was pretty much single-handedly responsible for me reviving the Active Listener. They really opened my eyes (ears?) to how much great music was still being made out there, and this is just too good to not share.

The Gong inspired moniker makes it pretty clear what to expect, and these two have really got their vintage seventies space-rock / psychedelic / progressive vibes honed to an impressive degree. 

Their self titled 2020 debut shows no signs of trying to find their way and aptly demonstrates how fully formed their sound already was at that stage, but it's their two Tarot albums, released six months apart in 2024 that really show the full mastery of their craft. Beautifully produced, these albums make full use of the sonic spectrum and the spacious mixes give the rich instrumentation (including plenty of mellotron, flutes and sitars) plenty of room to shine. And the treated vocals are absolutely on point.

Broadcast meets early seventies Pink Floyd would I guess be a starting point, but there's plenty more touched upon here and it's all done masterfully. These would be holy grail albums if they'd been released in the seventies, no doubt.

I'm sure a lot of you will already be familiar with these albums but for anyone who has yet to discover them, now's the time. Superb stuff.

Luster

This Belgian group describe themselves as "the missing link between Mazzy Star, Pentangle, Broadcast and Enhet for Fri Musik", so in all honesty there was no way I was not going to check this out. 

Often with these press-releases the reality can't match the hyberbole but in this case they're right on the money - no pipe dreams here.

It's spooky and a bit ethereal and has some doomy drones that give it a bit of a ritualistic folk-horror vibe at times. And at other times it's beautifully evocative and naturalistic.

This 2022 release was ten years in the making apparently. Hopefully a follow up doesn't take that long to manifest.

A Return + Moonrite

Six years! It's been a while since I was last on here. 

How you all doing? 

Life got pretty busy here and for the longest time I almost completely stopped investing time in new music. I got comfortable listening to what I knew and found that I had to really work to connect with anything new.

But over the last month or so I've made some positive lifestyle changes which have, among other things, put me in the right sort of headspace to start being receptive to new music again. And it turns out that there's a lot of pretty impressive stuff still happening out there. So I'm going to start sharing it again.

Time won't allow for anything like the scope of what was going on here before. It'll just be me, not the wonderful team I had working with me previously. I won't be posting lengthy reviews or compiling samplers. But the urge to share has returned with the urge to discover so I'll be posting links and sharing my thoughts on music that speaks to me as I come across it. And we'll see where things go from there. I've got a lot of catching up to do it seems.

Here's a new discovery to get the ball rolling: 

 

Moonrite are a French duo (two brothers) who released two albums and a 7" between 2016 and 2019 but seem to have shut up shop since then which is a pity as they really had a handle on what they do, namely early seventies style psychedelic occult rock. Not your garden variety stoner / doom either, we're talking serious vintage sounds here. And the treated vocals are amazing. 

 

Check them out - and if anyone knows what they're doing now, let me know.