Light-Space Modulator

Shadowing his psych-folk excursions with Heather Leigh and Six Organs of Admittance, Shackleton plumbs even deeper pits on his first collaboration with GNOD's Marlene Ribeiro. 'The Rising Wave' is an enigmatic set of dreamy psychedelia that's dubbed and blotted by Shackleton's lysergic treatments and kosmische instrumentation.

If psychedelic folk music suffers from stasis and fetish for nostalgia, 'The Rising Wave' dreams of an alternate reality. The serpentine 'Onda / Do You Believe?' marries Ribeiro's mantras with interlocking kalimba sequences that sound as if they've been galvanised by Zimbabwean traditional forms, and on 'The Long Buried Hope', Ribeiro dims the lights, taking a jazzier, loungier turn while Shackleton responds with Raymond Scott bleeps and spacey Schnitzler-inspired improvisations. At its core, the album's a set of proper songs, but by letting themselves think a little bigger, Shackleton and Ribeiro let the ink bleed so far outside the lines that an entirely different image emerges. Subliminally intricate and startlingly sensual, it's music that genuinely gets under the skin - we're not completely sure whether it's chamber pop, ritualistic minimalism or some kind of subverted library meditation, but it's one of the best things we've heard this year.