Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

The new 6-track Coyote album, The Higher The Sky, The Deeper The Ocean, landed recently, almost a year after its predecessor, Wailing To The Yellow Dawn. These two long-players follow a pair of similar releases from the Notts duo, Everything Moves, Nothing Rests from 2022 and Hurry Up And Live from 2024. All four sets share a similar space and feel, with aptly and expertly selected vocal samples, rich and deep Coyote dub basslines, Balearic beats, ambient synth chords and an optimistic, forward thinking feel. Coyote’s music often seems like its bathed in sunlight and The Higher The Sky… is no exception.

Across the collected tracks Coyote travel from ambient acoustic guitars and drones, on Muted Beauty, and the spaced out synths and off kilter on rhythms of Go All The Way, to the Balearic echo and four-four thump of A Drop In The Ocean, a tune with some lovely piano and bumping bass.

Dolce Far Niente is appropriately psychedelic, with tabla and tripped out effects, while Riviera Sound is exactly that – house pianos, jazzy keys and dub bass. The album’s final track and highlight No Coincidences glides in on a shuffling drumbeat, Latin percussion and the thrum of a Danny Thompson-esque double bass part. A piece that gathers steam, building into something insistent and hypnotic, the vocal sample repeated and the rhythms and melodies dazzling.

The vocal samples on this album – and the previous ones – could be described as quirky, just some ear candy to decorate the music, but I think there’s more going on than that. The speakers in these songs come across as Coyote – and us – trying to make meaning, and attempting to make sense of the world.

For psychologists “meaning-making” is a process by which humans try to understand the world, their lives, events and relationships, the self even. Constructing and deriving meaning from experiences and interactions. Meaning making is an attempt to create coherence from randomness.

In Muted Beauty the speaker finds wonder in the environment, repeating, ‘It’s a great big, beautiful world… nature’s a great teacher.’ Go All The Way follows this with a rich baritone intoning, ‘If you’re going to try, go all the way…’ and then, ‘OK, it’s time, let’s go.’ An invitation perhaps or the voice of experience. A Drop In The Ocean offers us more cosmic wisdom, ‘The ocean is freedom… this freedom… we all greet the new movement.’

On Dolce Far Niento – translation, ‘the sweetness of doing nothing’ – psychedelic guru Terrence McKenna appears and informs us, ‘It’s just going to get weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. The mushrooms said to me once, ‘this is what it’s like when a species prepare to depart for the stars.’

Nature, the environment, learning, freedom, movement, experience, going all the way, departure, the cosmos – the voices on The Higher The Sky, The Deeper The Ocean appear to be being brought together in an attempt to find a coherent way to live or to look at the world. (1)

The album closer, No Coincidences, has a longer sample, several sentences and some poetic allusions too – 

‘Light is a colour. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window your consciousness is [   ] by random factors… then you get to realise they’re not so random, there’s no such thing as coincidence.’

The following is then repeated, urgently…

 ‘Hurry please it’s time hurry up please it’s time.’

It’s dropped in several times for emphasis, the phrase framed by the dizzying music swirling around it (2). 

NOTES

(1) I’m also willing to accept this may be a load of pretentious twaddle and that Coyote just find samples they like and drop them in. (You stick with your instincts Adam. I don’t think there’s anything random about Coyote’s choices – Rob)

(2) ’Hurry up please it’s time’ is a phrase in TS Eliott’s The Waste Land, one of the 20^th century’s key works of poetry, a modernist masterpiece that’s open to a wide variety of interpretations and that deals with some key themes of the modern world- alienation, anxiety, dread, despair and death as narrated by various frenetic voices. It’s said that the poem is a comment on the post First World War world and the broken values of the West that led to the slaughter on the Western Front. It may be about religion and sexuality too. ‘Hurry up please it’s time’ is also the barman’s call when it’s time to empty the pub at last orders.

Coyote’s The Higher The Sky, The Deeper The Ocean can be ordered directly from NuNorthern Soul. 

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.