3rd Ear Experience, Stoned Gold: Ways to be Saved
Given the formidable title of Stoned Gold, the latest full-length from Joshua Tree-based heavy psychedelic rockers 3rd Ear Experience is nothing less than an attempt to present the very foundations of the band’s writing process. Or, perhaps more appropriately, it’s a presentation of those roots entirely. The story goes that bandleader Robbi Robb was pulling the group together to work on their next full-length — either their fifth or sixth, depending on what you count — for Space Rock Productions, which also stood behind 2016’s studio outing, Stones of a Feather.
Robb, who leads a rotating cast of players in the amorphous group that may or may not at any given point include Amritakripa, Alan Dude Swanson, Richard Stuverud, Dino Archon, Dug Pinnick, Eric Ryan, Joey Vera, Butch Reynolds, and/or Jorge Bassman, had toured Europe for the last record, had signed a booking deal to go back, and so one imagines the creative juices were flowing and spirits were high. The band would start or end each day of the session with an improvised jam. Something to get the blood moving. A warm-up or a cool-down, and maybe the basis for a song to come together. Not at all unheard of. Well, when it came time to dig through the days’ worth of recordings and piece together the next 3rd Ear Experience long-player, Robb found that it was these jams that best represented the band as a whole and their musical intentions.
Accordingly, Stoned Gold arrives via Space Rock Productions — the label, one is compelled to note, owned by Scott “Dr. Space” Heller of Øresund Space Collective — as a collection of these jams, led by Robb‘s own scorching guitar work, with six tracks and just under 70 minutes of righteous desert freakouts, presented one into the next with a variety of personality and presentation to them that feels emblematic of the creative process behind their making.
Structures are way, way open. Vibes are way, way open. The spirit behind Stoned Gold is less like an album and more like an audio documentary — the idea being to bring to listener as close as possible to 3rd Ear Experience in the making. They’re not the only band to take this approach, and one would be remiss to not mention the progressive explorations of Øresund Space Collective here as forerunners of the improv-based heavy psych style, but it’s exceedingly rare for an American outfit to do so and to do so with such abandon as 3rd Ear Experience bring to pieces like the eight-minute title-track or more extended “I am Not Robot (Warm up Jam Day 3),” which follows opener and longest cut (immediate points) “Infinite Unmanifest (Warm up Jam Day 1)” and the subsequent “Iceberg Dream (Last Jam Day 4)” as one of three pieces named in part for when it took place in the session.
It’s telling of the mission behind Stoned Gold that the album would launch with a warm-up jam from the first day, since that effectively places the audience at the same starting point — equal footing — as the group itself as they begin to unfold what becomes the immersive, molten flow of the release as a whole. Whether or not “Iceberg Dream (Last Jam Day 4)” marks the end of the recording session as a whole, I don’t know, but it would make sense, and taking the two back-to-back is to hear 3rd Ear Experience shift deftly between classic space rock propulsion, exploratory melodic wash and an ultimate drive into cosmic swirl.
Those two songs alone comprise nearly half an hour of listening, but with as shuffling start of “Stoned Gold” signals before the band starts to weave its way through a couple harrowing turns toward a Sabbathian riff peppered with a couple lines of obscure, effects-laden vocals, it’s abundantly clear that they by no means make up the complete picture of the album’s scope, and indeed that turns out to be the case as “I am Not Robot (Warm up Jam Day 3)” digs into its 13 minutes of post-Hendrix shimmer and dazzle, more of a straight-ahead flow than a build, but underscored by highlight fuzzy bass tone in its midsection and honest enough to keep going even after it starts to fall apart.
It is surprisingly hypnotic in that, and that makes the transition into “No Walls, No Wars” somewhat more jarring. The penultimate cut is probably as close as 3rd Ear Experience come to traditional songcraft on the record, starting out with African-style percussion before cutting out to a solo-vocal verse and resuming its rhythmic charge. Swirls come and go around this central tribalist figure, and where so much of the album is instrumental, “No Walls, No Wars” is full of words, syllables, lines and obscure shouts, met head-on by an ongoing guitar lead, as well as drums, keys and synth, all of which seem to find further emphasis than in any of the previous jams. At 5:20, just about everything except a line of effects drops out and there’s one last verse to bring everything to a head, and the band presses forth once more into the groove at its foundation, fading slowly to let the toms of closer “The Drone” take hold.
Airy, peaceful guitar arrives with a kind of post-rock feel soon into the 12-minute finale, and once again there are vocals early in a kind of meditative spirit, but just after four minutes in, they’re swallowed by a surge of lead guitar and volume, beginning a back and forth of open spaces and consuming solos that continues until the latter finally seems to win out just after a drum pause near the six-minute mark. Less improvised-sounding — and loosely Zeppelin-esque, somehow — that “The Drone” nonetheless caps with a foray into the sonically unknown (some last lines sneak in there as well; don’t tell anybody) could not be more fitting a way to end Stoned Gold, which in its results lives up to the promised vibrancy of atmosphere in the manner it came together.
3rd Ear Experience have essentially issued their listeners an invitation to join them on this journey, which could hardly resonate more in its endgame if it were happening in real-time on a stage or in a studio, and that invitation is well worth accepting for both its realization of concept and the raw experience of the travel itself. Whether you engage consciously or turn off your mind, relax and float down-sand, 3rd Ear Experience‘s Stoned Gold shines bright.
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