The Dreaming by Howlin' Magic

LAL-38
CD, released in 2007

Recorded 3.7 billion years after the origin of life on the planet we call Earth (4.4 billion years after water first liquefied)

"One last CD from the Lal Lal Lal batch, an act not from Finland but Santa Cruz, California, ladies and gentlemen, it's Howlin' Magic. I first heard Mr. Magic (it's a one-man band) a year or two ago via a couple self-released CDRs. They had nice crude psychedelic magik-marker artwork and the sounds were definitely blown-out psyched-out fuzz-drool, but I just couldn't get into the overall arc. There were riffs, and there was forward movement, but none of it seemed to interrelate to or interdepend on anything else. Seemed like another case of 'rad sounds/no songs'. Siltblog took him down harshly, but I never wanted to write him off completely, and it is kinda nice to see this new disc with more of the handmade psychedelic artwork, promising song titles like "Thanaton III", "The Oort Cloud", "Lord Jagannath", "Imagination is Power", and further elucidating that last one, a truly excellent "revolution" manifesto on the inside. (It's part of a longer post you can find on his blog.) I think I'm gonna keep the album for the artwork and the manifesto alone, but, although it is probably my fave of the (three?) Howlin' Magic that I've heard, the awesome sounds are still adding up to less than the sum of their parts...." - Larry Dolman / BLOGSTITUDE

"The Dreaming gives 12 high intesity doses of Californian Jesse Rakusin's solo psych screams. Like a Daniel Higgs who can only operate in fifth gear, Rakusin tries to channel magick and ancestral wisdom through his fuzz-saturated, thrashed out explosions of guitar melody. Many of these pieces access an unfettered politicised rage, like primitivist take on Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner". When Rakusin fills out the solo sound by accompanying himself, the drumming, hazy and unfocused, makes you think of a mid-breakdown Skip Spence. Yet the woozy gravity of the blues rock shapes keeps them from drifting into self-absorbed chaos." - Sam Davies, The Wire #291

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