VISIONS OF OTHERNESS (Blackest Rainbow, 2009)
CRYSTAL WIZARD (Stunned, 2008)
Freakin' awesome steel stringed explorations through space and time with Dewey Mahood, guitarist of Portland's Eternal Tapestry! He's released a handful of tapes in the past, but Crystal Wizard is the first cd-r release (actually I've got a couple - dewey) from this psychedelic mystery man, and it's a doozy. Layers of bells, hazy vocal drones and colorful whips of delayed guitar adorn the steel-stringed compositions. Roots music meets psychedelia in a wild hoopla of acoustic trippiness. Super limited and complete with cosmic artwork by Mr. Mahood himself. Yes! (Aquarius Records)
Remember the name Dewey Mahood. In an era where anyone can make a record but few will get to hear most of them, Mahood stands out as one of those adventurous guitarists crying in the wilderness who ought to be more well-known. "Crystal Wizard" won't change that. The bottom line is, though, that Mahood is fingerpicking his way into the mystic. His haunting moans are also right on, coming across as intense and not added on for art (or artiness sake). On these six tracks, he plays drums and bells as well as guitar, the whole thing recorded on a 4-track cassette. From that micro-seed has come big sound: space, layered, growing in intensity. Reverb, echo, wah-wah and simple, light chords create a woven pattern of meditative but hard hitting grooves; the guitar lines wash over one another until they mingle, and become something bigger and deeper. There is a lot of bold, confident playing here, a kind of searching with the faith that you will find what you're looking for eventually. The heights of that search are in the slow drift of "Still Water" and the loud power of "Forever Glowing Vista." Dewey Mahood has plied his trade in other spaces, with Eternal Tapestry and Bloodbiker especially, but he has upped the ante on his own with "Alchemy of Darkness." This is a must-have. (Music Emissions)
Plankton Wat's Dewey Mahood (Eternal Tapestry) plays complex and prickly guitar instrumentals drenched in an indefinable psychedelic haze. Crystal Wizard, his second solo release out under the Plankton Wat moniker (following a DNT Records debut earlier this year), is a relaxing yet acid-tinged journey in the American Primitive tradition. This is steel string so pure you can actually hear the steel. Whether stoned or not, Mahood's music is made for a dimly-lit room and a fine cup of tea. Although their foundation is built from the guitar up, Mahood has also overdubbed these tracks with occasional bells, sparse percussion, and even some chanted vocals. The melodies have a distinct Middle Eastern vibe, vaguely reminiscent of work by Steffen Basho-Junghans but considerably less structured. Especially impressive is the drearily magical "Serenity Boundless in Black Night," an atmospheric mood piece heavy in overdubs and reverse sampling. However, it is the sprawling, ten minute finale, "Reflections of Crystal Wizard," that takes the cake; it is a slow-building mini-epic that gradually becomes more and more cluttered before it reaches its climactic breaking point. Crystal Wizard may not be what you think of when you think of psychedelic music, but Dewey Mahood's brand of abstract instrumental guitar is like an acid trip of its own. And as it has been limited to 100 copies by impressive CDR label Stunned Records, you'll want to track this sucker down as soon as you can. (Indieville)
ALCHEMY OF DARKNESS (DNT Records, 2008)
Plankton Wat moniker is Dewey Mahood of Portland psych-rockers Eternal Tapestry. This tape is Mahood with a multi-track recorder, a guitar and a wah-wah pedal. Full disclosure, I don’t usually go for this kinda thing but this tape rips. Mahood is almost like a one-man GHQ. He piles layers and layers of guitar on top of each other sometimes they end up with a darker edged vibe like the fantastic opener “Of Darkness and Shadows” and sometimes the tape veers into slightly brighter territory as in “Transformation of Magical Properties” which flows into a pretty acoustic guitar piece. “Rituals” is a relatively sparse acoustic piece and it’s really great. It teeters on near dissonance throughout the whole track so there’s a lot more tension than one can usually pull out of an acoustic guitar. The second side is split in half between “Spiritual Invocation” and “Conscious Mind.” The former features a number arpeggios, some reversed, all laid on top each other. It’s sound in perpetual motion, creating an image of a landscape’s decay in fast motion or granules of sand being sucked away. The latter is more like the last light of dusk before evaporating into complete darkness. A long, slow fade of burbling notes to silence.
It looks like there is a scant few copies of this tape still available from the label so email if you’re interested and also stick around for the upcoming Plankton Wat LP on DNT. (Auxiliary Out)
On Alchemy of Darkness, Dewey Mahood of Eternal Tapestry takes us on a sloshy, interstellar ride filled with waves of wah-ed out electric guitar. Bringing to mind some of the acid-bluesy explorations of Matt Valentine and the electric ripples of Tom Carter, Mahood has crafted an album that is as simple as it is otherworldly. The first side starts slowly with tentative, measured guitar figures that are slowly bathed in reverb, becoming more and more prolonged as they begin to overlap. These gorgeous overlapping ripples begin to take on an edge, with a slight bite of distortion keeping the whole mess from drifting off into the ether. Continuously refracting into gorgeous peaks and valleys, this wonderfully long first side is finished off with more steel string guitar bathed in ambience. As the jams on the second side of Alchemy of Darkness rock and sway in the waves trailing from Mahood's ever-spacey guitar, the dreamy mood that makes this tape so wonderful becomes comforting and warm. With such gorgeous execution and flow, Alchemy of Darkness becomes one massive, droning meditation that won't be leaving my tape deck for a good while. (c60 Radio)
Plankton Wat is Dewey from Eternal Tapestry's solo guise where he sits in a chair, oils up his wah pedal, and goes to fucking town. Total one-man instrumental space-drift raga-blues with an emphasis on delay (reverse and regular), wah, and brain-ooze. One could make the claim that there's a lot of this kinda stuff flying around out there on the information superhighway but in truth you could really say that about anything, so that doesn't hold much water for me. To my ears, this is the best Plankton outing I've yet heard, great grey mood rings flashing with shadows of color and layers of refracted light, gently picked strings, bursts of hypnotizing distortion, falling leaves of echo and hush. Would be nice to lay on yr back on a fucked up rug and have Dewey serenade you with these blissed, blue ballads. Could use a pillow too, as long as we're dreaming. (Cassette Gods)
OTHER WORLDS (Solar Commune, 2007)
Plankton Wat's the solo project of Dewey Mahood, a key member of Eternal Tapestry, and occasional part of the Jackie-O Motherfucker swarm/collective. It's a beautiful, graceful thing of looped and picked acoustic guitar, following a wander-glimmer-drone structure that psych fans in Portland should be well aquainted with. With barely any of the cacophony or aggression Eternal Tapestry sometimes builds to, "Morning Light"–and the album in general–gently beckons us to fall back into our own head. Not the busy part–the worry and chaos cortex–but, the part that I've had a hell of a time finding lately, the pocket where our thoughts go when we're perfectly happy to just drift and stare. (Willamette Week)