Alastair Galbraith - Lagash

Exceptionally good news for those of a certain disposition - Lagash by Alastair Galbraith is here, the latest long player from Dunedin's legendary experimental songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and tape music idol. A new record from the ever-busy Galbraith isn't too much of a surprise in itself, given his quietly stunning output in recent years includes the solo LP Seconds Mark III (A Colourful Storm), last year’s The Drum Is The Shaman’s Horse from his long running duo with Bruce Russell,  A Handful Of Dust, and a hard-to-track scattering of self-released material and ashen ephemera along the way. Even for the man that never sleeps, Lagash does feel especialy notable, a sharp left turn into long form folk transmutation that's equal parts homely and alien. Galbraith isn't entirely alone here, the three tracks on the A side made in conjunction with guitarist Jackson Harry, while the B side is entirely inhabited by ‘Lockdown In Lagash’, a panicked dirge which sees Galbraith on fiddle and King Loser's Chris Heazlewood on drums. Still, the idiosyncracies are all his own, a characteristically Galbraith-like wrestling with the oddities of the world. The results are quite astonishing, uniting Galbraith’s characteristic folk-intimacy with an ambituous and committed compositional approach that feels as psychedelic as it is pastroral. Magickal realism quite possibly. Real magic almost certainly. Super limited quanities, as expected.