Pacific Walker finds the ever-enigmatic Odawas duo, Michael Tapscott and Isaac Edwards, once again stitching their sigils into the damp, breathing fabric of mycelial folk, their transmissions carried on cosmic whispers.
This music is birthed in the glowing core of some bioluminescent underworld, where forgotten rituals hum beneath the forest loam, and sound is felt before it is heard.
Michael James Tapscott, a Bay Area mystic, has been casting musical spells under countless monikers since 2004—Odawas, More Animals of the Arctic, Royal Geography Society, China the Band, Pacific Walker, and his own name.
Raphi Gottesman, percussionist, classical guitarist, and potential time traveler, joins the cabal, and together, in 2023, they wove their first transmission: a self-titled initiation rite stretching from the furthest shadow of the outermost nebula to the innermost Temple of the Eye Am.
For their follow-up release on Bluesanct, Pacific Walker tunneled even deeper into the cryptic lexicon of existence, charting a star-haunted course through the crackling transmissions of lost private-press new-age cassettes and self-help cassette purgatories—mantras of self-realization loop endlessly in the ghostly hiss of magnetic tape.
The seekers are adrift, but the map is written in the hum of their own third-eye frequencies. Still waters run deep, and the answers they seek may not lead them to enlightenment but to an eternity of unknowing.
For those whose sensibilities lean toward the eerie and esoteric, there is much to dissolve into here. “Blessed in The Chapel of the Tears (Crying)” emerges like the voice of a forgotten deity. Its warped, slowed-down vocals crawl from the tape and hiss like a sermon from a preacher lost in the fog of deep time—imagine auto-tuned but possessed, speaking in tongues, resurrecting the dead.
“Rainbow Bodies of Light” is a full-body astral projection accident, a weightless suspension in a translucent, neon void. It is the auditory equivalent of being abducted by something you can’t quite see but can feel moving under your skin.
“Birds in Paradise” deceives with its name—this isn’t an aviary, it’s an underwater cathedral, its tones submerging you in undulating currents of sound, drifting toward a distant, golden glow that never quite arrives.
The album closes with a slow-motion invocation descending into a shadowed and verdant abyss. Low, manipulated vocals summon a circle of forest phantoms beneath the otherwise delicate instrumentation. It is a hymn whispered through the teeth of the void, yet somehow, you will find yourself humming along.
Imagine a church that has burned to the ground, yet its hymns still echo. Imagine seasick drones warbling like the drug-thick tongues of true believers, speaking to something beyond the veil.
Now, in the soft, undulating blue underbelly of the colloidal aether, the kosmiche whispers of some kind of guru press into your ear.
Do you listen? Do you dare?
Check out Lost In The Valley of The Sun by Pacific Walker on Bandcamp here.
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