Shelter & Orion With Turner Williams Jr. - Krakatoa

French outpost Les Disques Omnison opens its 2025 in some fashion with this three-way collaboration between some of the label's key players. Still a young imprint with a modest catalogue, there's nonetheless a clear sensibility being worked at, one that comes into focus with a record with its controls set for somewhere between the heart of the sun and inner-est of zones. Recorded in Shelter's own Studio 121, where one imagines the mushroom oil doth floweth and the smoke thick enough to climb like a ladder, the trio lock into some kind of trance-induced polarity, uniting Eastern and Western idioms and going all the way out to come all the way back in. In a cyclical universe, if you journey far enough to one side you'll inevitably end up on the other. Describing Krakatoa as a trip feels somewhat inadequate, for this is a deeply psychedelic record, cerebral in parts (as the stated influences of Pierre-Jean Croset and Latif Khan attest) and instinctive in others, with the overall sense of a set of musicians well attuned to the impulses of one another. Combining a range of electronic tablas, dub delays, flutes, bagpipes organ (even the label doesn't seem to know what this is), and shahi baaja, its players are obviously well versed, but never do they present as virtuoso, instead seemingly in search of some psychick (dare i say spiritual? I dare not) understanding that could sit anywhere amongst the Organic Music Society, the Taj Mahal Travellers, Charlemagne Palestine or Smegma. If Nurse With Wound were to put their list together now, don't be surprised to find Krakatoa somewhere amongst it.