Secession 96

For listeners who were frustrated by Magic Hour’s gentle, elliptical songs, well, Secession 96 is the album for you – abandoning sung voice and lyric, Secession 96 is made up of four instrumentals, two of which feel like extensions, of some sort, of “Passing Words,” the side-long epic from their previous album, Will They Turn You On or Will They Turn On You. Those two songs – “Rosebud” and “Sunrise” – are beautiful enough as it is, Wayne Rogers’ guitar following its own logic (his soloing feels like one unexpected outcome of La Monte Young’s ‘draw a straight line and follow it’ directive), spinning off into space as the group screams into orbit around him, though “Sunrise”’s acoustic guitars have an ethereal radiance.. But the album is bookended by the mystic avant-folk of the two parts of “Sunset,” where acoustic strings bob and weave around the dampened shuffle of percussion and an ever-droning shruti box. It connects, clearly, with their tourmates (and obvious inspirations) Ghost, but also places Magic Hour in a broader continuum of groups who made the necessary connections between psychedelic rock and acid folk – temporal dislocation; mental delirium; a music both electric and archaic.