Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. 

The Otherworld is the latest album by C-Thru – aka Texan musician, Jesse Edwards – released via Vancouver-based record label, Pacific Rhythm. Jesse started out playing shoegaze / psychedelia with Kranky stalwart, Jessica Bailiff,  but has now moved into the realm of cosmic / ambient electronics. The album is ten tracks long, and akin to fifty minutes of aural balm, soaked in plenty of sounds that wash up on the shores of The Balearics too.

Out Of Body Gateway is the entry point – synths sweeping left and right, and a warm, echo-laden vocal welcoming us onboard. From hereon in The Otherworld is very much one piece of work, timbre and tone becoming more fleshed out and coloured in. Awake (In A Dream) adds hissing percussion and pitter-pattering rhythms, simple hypnotic keys, slow-moving melodies, and waves of texture.

Geodesic Visions is a music of little fluffy clouds and flotation tanks. Built on a beatific break and bucolic bleeps. Voices, possibly from 1950s TV, pondering on dreams and memory. Time Being boasts gentle bursts of live bass. The seudctive Slow Dive Thru The 7^th Plane forces everything through filters and phase. Terrifically trippy and taking the tempo right down. At the heart of the album, is the title track, a total dream state. The sound of waking up bathed in sunshine. Soft synths and keys lovingly layered over sensitively skittering drums. 

Things shift a little with 3 Therianthropes In A Floating Pyramid – seven slightly more beat-driven minutes. Rose Freq then fades in, wobbling on ripples of running water, surfing soaring notes that could be birdsong. Its keys that conjuring Vangelis at his most optimistic. Its graceful glide finally fading out, leaving nothing but whirring. Glimpses Of Concentric Realities begins with more TV voices, this time fixated on U.F.O.s. A familiar break is stuttered and fractured, and in amongst the synthesized serenity someone reassures us that, “It’s going to be alright again.”

This cosmic/ Balearic / ambient odyssey comes to close with Vivid Voyage, led by chopped up, chattering oscillations. A rhythm section briefly joins in, before falling away. The tune’s trajectory like a spacecraft on a flight through rainbows, tearing free of gravity, toward tranquility and that titular otherworld. 

C-Thru’s The Otherworld is out now on Pacific Rhythm.

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.