Denver neo-kraut astronauts Woodsman capped off this year’s eponymous LP with “Teleseparation,” a chunk of psych euphoria draped in delay trails that stands on its own as a primer of the trio’s compositional strategies. Interwoven twin guitar leads chime through a cyclical melodic pattern telegraphed to Earth via the flickerings of some pentatonic pulsar, while the grid laid out by the drums tightens into a confident underpinning with enough momentum to push the proceedings into a washed out climax. The track’s “final” cut sheds some light on the band’s studio practice of compressing discrete segments of longer takes into concise narrative collages packed with peak shred content. While certain licks and rhythms crossed over onto wax, much of the journey that bookended those chosen moments could have feasibly never left the session file on the hard drive, laid to rest in the sub-zone limbo strewn with decades of Klaus Schulze outtakes and edition-of-none proto-Emeralds cassette jammers.
Lucky us, then, that Woodsman unearthed the master session of “Teleseparation,” and has prepped it for public consumption in all of its exploratory glory. If the album take represents a pure distillation, the 27 minutes of the Teleseparation EP premiering below document a gradual unfolding of a kernel of an idea into a suite of juxtaposed atmospheres that each possess a mechanism for forward motion. Instead of settling too deep into any one groove, the three instrumentalists work through each segment to heighten the tension to a breaking point and burst into the next wave of animated three-mind interplay. Across the fluid trajectory of the jam, the guitars lay out a stream of droning textural pads and bright chordal comping before ascending into crisp co-leads that channel the weight and drama of crenscendo-core post-rock burners like EITS or Do Say Make Think. All the while, the percussion’s crystalline pulse beats alongside the guitars in hi-fi clarity, cresting into a breakneck pattern around the halfway mark that stands as the piece’s most kinetic, hypnotizing passage.
The Teleseparation EP is available to order on limited edition cassette right now. Catch Woodsman on tour in Europe this summer, or revisit their self-titled LP on Fire Talk to receive their distilled transmissions whensoever you please.
• Woodsman: http://woodsmanman.bandcamp.com
• Fire Talk Records: http://firetalk.bigcartel.com
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