Black Sun Ensemble - s/t (Reissue)
(Camera Obscura)
Back in the early 1990s, in the waning years of high school, my musical tastes were taking a turn. The tasty terrain of subterranean noise rock, experimentalism, and psychedelia were fresh new frontiers for me, charted bravely by the guidance of a friend who compulsively scoured the pages of Forced Exposure and ordered up anything which looked to satisfy his unabated yearning for pure "out" sound (the requisite discovery of recreational mind-altering substances assisted as well, with an oh-so-gentle nudge). My hometown is Boise, Idaho, mind you... not exactly an urban hotbed for subculture. Discovery was a process derived from a labor of love, the hunt being just as precious as the kill. One of the musical libations of which my friend popped the top and poured into my brain was Tragic Magic by the mysterious Black Sun Ensemble. Combining five live acid rock tracks with seven mystical acoustic tunes, Tragic Magic proved to be one of those formidable albums destined to nest up in a particularly cozy nook in my steadily opening mind. I bought it immediately, since the local record store happened to have a copy of the CD in stock. Little did I know that Tragic Magic was actually the last hurrah for the Black Sun Ensemble before its seemingly abrupt hiatus, and for some reason, the three albums released previously on Reckless Records did not make it into my collection. And so passes the sands of time, but Tragic Magic never left my collection, even though it languished for a while, forgotten as other distractions made their sojourns.
In 1999, the Black Sun Ensemble rose again from their Lower Sonora Desert home of Tucson, Arizona with the issue of Sky Pilot on Camera Obscura. The love affair was renewed, but with Sky Pilot, the flame was more temporal than spiritual, a series of nice flings but nothing to rekindle the relationship as anything beyond friends who sometimes shack up. "Sky Pilot Suite", the newly penned 20+ minute opus, certainly promised something long term, but all in all the collision of psyche-folk and Mahavishnu Orchestra flurries that is Black Sun Ensemble's hallmark didn't quite haze over the mind as did the band's earlier trajectories. Still, with all the tormenting demons and hallucinogenic casualties leader Jesus Acedo had endured in the mid-90's, and given the knowledge that the meat of Sky Pilot (previously entitled Psycho Master El and released under the mutated name Black Sun Legion on San Jacinto Records) became the primary kindling for a bonfire lit to exorcise the perceived evil coursing through Jesus' veins (literally), it was an absolute joy to know he was back in action, playing live and composing again.
Entirely out of nowhere I have been blindly pummeled, because The Black Sun Ensemble are back, but this time with an unexpected reissue of an extremely rare pressing of their very first album. To me, it's like a brand new release, and this must be the case for legions of others because apparently very few ears have been privileged enough to soak in the absolute revelation that is this album. Issued as a private pressing on Jesus Acedo's own imprint Pyknotic Records in 1985 and adorned with the caption "An Instrumental Trio, Playing Their Mixture of Electric and Acoustic Orchestrations," the crudely packaged treasure (two pieces of cardboard stapled together with a primitive black and white illustration) barely found anybody to revel in the joy it contained beyond Tucson--and even there it was largely ignored. Luckily it found its way into writer Byron Coley's sphere in 1986. He tripped over it in a used folk bin and, gravitated to its unorthodox appearance, gave it a shot, and subsequently became fried. One thing led to another and the then-upstart Reckless Records came under the spell of the Black Sun Ensemble, releasing the largely-conceived-to-be debut album (also self-titled) and two others thereafter, Lambent Flame and Elemental Forces. While some versions of the tracks on the obscure debut found their way to the Reckless s/t album and onto the acoustic half of Tragic Magic (unbeknownst to me until now!!!), this is a portal back in time to the mid-80's (where this music most certainly must have stuck out like a pulsating boil), revealing a treasure trove of unbeatable psychedelic proportions, compositions swelling with perfection and spiked with fantastic guitar playing by the young Jesus Acedo.
Documenting the first incarnation of the Black Sun Ensemble and the only album with the group as a trio, the music hovers like buzzards in the desert over the dehydrated body of psychedelic rock, encircling their prey, waiting to feed on the corpse and draw new strength. A resulting mergence of melodic acoustic/Latin folk, Middle Eastern, raga, acid rock, and woolly feedback is given propulsion by a steady backbeat of rock bass and drums. "Ruby Eyes of China" leads off the reissue (slight variations in the sequence exist between the original and the reissue) with upbeat confidence, adorned with incessant acoustic strumming and laced with ecstatic electric guitar soloing. "Heart of the Sky," the original opening track and for my money the most glorious song on here, is laid out like a gently colored mosaic. It's an ecstatic piece, in which methodically chiming acoustic guitar coalesces with slow burning electric melodies. A solemn peace envelops the mind, like peering out at the warm glow of the morning sun, heavy lidded, after a peyote-soaked night in the sweatlodge which invoked Shamanic visions and healing revelations. "A Chunk of Mandolin Love" flashes muted light from scintillating acoustic fractals, illuminating lysergic splashes of acid leads; "Blue Thunder," subtitled "Improvisation in the key of A," spits out triumphant licks which slice through a nice euphoric haze. It just doesn't let up! Solo electric guitar pyrotechnics ("Ice Breaker"), Arabian scorched landscapes ("Golden Rays"), iridescent ragas on just electric or acoustic guitar and hand drums ("Emerald Eye," "Mandolin Winds"), and solo acoustic guitar rapture ("Mayan Dance") are all spices used in a tremendously savory trans-global stew. Two songs are actually lost in the ether from the original album, but they are more than made up for with the inclusion of two remarkable, previously unreleased songs from the same era ("Emerald Eye 2," "Bleeding Heart"), tunes which weave seamlessly into this flying carpet of a record.
"It is difficult to think of a band that has ever produced psychedelic music that sounded even remotely like the original Black Sun's" notes Byron Coley in his liners to the reissue. And that speaks volumes. The Black Sun Ensemble exist in an entirely singular plane of their own, and this reissued, re-mastered, nearly-lost jewel brings me back to those early years, as my mind's receptors were being remapped to welcome the trippier aspects of sound. Camera Obscura's efforts to exhume this vibrant entity has most certainly rekindled my love affair with the Black Sun Ensemble into full-blown devotion, and this time my eye will not wander. 2001's reissue of the year!
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