Inner Islands Offers A Name To Return To With Acceptance

Braden over at spiritual exploration label Inner Islands has two new releases for you, and they are both game-changers for the artists involved.

Firstly we have To Return To, the debut album for Ashan (AKA Sean Conrad AKA gkfoes vjgoaf - foregoing that mouthful is a good idea...). To Return To is a peaceful blend of organics and subtle electronics, things that followers of Conrad would be aware and open to, yet it's the male/female choral vocal chants that lead us through the keyhole into a different world altogether.

Ashan - How Sweetly I Am Loved

Secondly we have Acceptance, the latest (and final) recording from Braden's own project WYLD WYZRDZ. The songs are a reflection on acceptance, built on a collection of soft drones, melodic hooks, vocal chants and moving percussion. It's easily the best thing that WW has put together, and furthermore highlights the hole left after such an artist bids us adieu.

WYLD WYZRDZ - The Road Of Acceptance

Go on, support this rad label by heading here and getting amongst these astral jams. Well worth all effort and time exerted.

More Mystical Inner Islands Magic

On a beautiful and lazy Saturday morning, you would be hard pressed to find something that suits the mood more than this...

Im yet to find a single release from the Inner Islands label that I havent at least found some semblance of enjoyment out of. Focusing primarily on artists who create sound collages that reach out to the environment and become one with it, they have steadily built a roster of acts whose creative aesthetics adheres stringently to this ideal. The two latest releases unsurprisingly follow this trend, yet also prove to be the most exquisite examples of this ethereal experiment. Both acts we have featured in some form here on Sonic Masala in the past.


First we have the incredibly difficult to vocalise gkfoes vjgoaf, whose Nature Eternal Striving doesn't ever attempt to hide the fact that this is a sonic communion with Mother Earth. 'River Friends' is a perfect example of the gentle benignity this artist (known to his mum as Sean Conrad - now isn't that an easier name to utter?) inhabits, further augmented by his nomadic nature which at this juncture has him residing in the idyllic climes of New Zealand. A considerable step up from previous album Glacial Ways - and that is no easy feat.

gkfoes vjgoaf - River Friends


The second is Spirit Canoes, the new release by Utah tribal bunny Stag Hare. Opening with the burbling brook, wind chimes and birdsongs of 'A Rose For The White Witch', this record in its four parts is very much a study in the marriage between analog sonics and field recordings, albeit in a trance-like hippified teepee, with a celebrant whose body is of an Adonis and the head of a buffalo. These tracks are superb, the gradual rise in power of these elongated tracks hold a natural force of their own.

Stag Hare - A Rose For The White Witch

Inner Islands have created their own pigeonhole, one they never intend on leaving, and for that we should be eternally grateful. Grab Nature Eternal Striving or Spirit Canoes here.

Double Dose Of Inner Islands

Braden J McKenna (WYLD WYZRDZ) has just started up his own label called Inner Islands. Basically its a place for him and other like-minded chaps to produce musical pieces that hark back to nature and the inner journey. No sonic stone is left unturned.

The first of two latest releases is The Joy of Awakening, a contemplative suite of tracks that marries rainforest field recordings with finger picking guitar and shimmering dreams by Sean Conrad, going under the moniker Gkfoes Vjgoaf (and no, I have no idea how to pronounce it). Its a fairly dense piece, and feels more like a meditative experience rather than an actual album to listen to. As Conrad states, The Joy Of Awakening has come to be "about a journey that the listener goes on. Imagine your celestial body traveling and being taken by an unseeable tribe of spirits that are trying to help you see the true nature of things. They sing and play for you and lead you from day to night through the forest, the ocean, and up into the mountains to reach your final resting place in the temple".

River Spirit Dragon (comprised of Stag Hare, who alongside White Rainbow put out a great split LP last year; Gkfoes Vjgoaf; and WYLD WYZRDZ) on the other hand is a forty minute, two track, meandering opus, built up out of an initial droning foundation and allowed to float on the slipstreams of time and space. It is not as exciting as The Joy Of Awakening, but there is a definite sense of kindred spirit in what Inner Islands is attempting to achieve here. Later in the year the label will release LPs from all three of these spatial mavericks, adhering to that continual spiritual sojourn into the sonic Other...

Gkfoes Vjgoaf - In Clouds
River Spirit Dragon - Spaceways