One of the most productive and reliable psychedelic outsiders today, LA resident Alex Gray, happens to be so due to his absurd versatility. Consisting of endeavors ranging from the noise-laced furtherance of chopped-and-screwed distortions as DJ/PURPLE/IMAGE (formerly Heat Wave) to fleeting thrash punk in the duo Earthsurfers, Gray’s trajectory fluctuates so often that his next undertaking could really be anything and stay in character. Among all of his current outlets, the drone-rooted Deep Magic is the least foreign considering his origins in the massive psych ensemble Dreamcolour. Even so, Deep Magic’s creeping reach outside of its initial boundaries continues to grab ahold of puzzling abstractions.
Closed Eyes is indicative of Gray’s constantly widening scope, beyond last year’s glimmering Lucid Thought and approaching the global ambit applied to recent exploits from Sean McCann, coincidentally an ex-member of Dreamcolour and providing mastering for the album. Cultivating a free-flowing, instrumentally teeming microcosm seems limitless enough to have inspired more than the small population employing it, and its prospects (McCann’s The Capital, Isengrind’s Night of Raining Fire, Black Swan’s Aeterna) have been grand. Closed Eyes carries this torch, though Gray allows his affinity for prismatic coloration and delicate tropicalia to bleed into it.
Gray has said that recording involved less introspection and more so dealt with “making a cavernous space and then putting things in that space and seeing how they knock around,” but that quote isn’t necessarily telling of the dimensions of that space or how frequently they change. Looped marimba swarming “Visual Noise” submerges into a suppressed trance, diffusing into “Visual Snow”’s desolate expanse of piano and windchimes. Conversely, “Motionless” works to erratically manipulate a phrase though in the grander scheme just rotates the view from which it’s observed. Bountifully orchestrated, “Dark Retreat” has no defined arc but uses its spiraling passage of elegantly placed effects and pitch-shifted moans to guide the profound opus to a lulling close. For all its sporadic shifts and scattershot arrangements Closed Eyes applies them to create an inconspicuously fluid listen.
[Deep Magic Website]
[Stream/Buy Closed Eyes from Debacle Records]
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