Ash Brooks “Temple of the Roses” CD (Flower Room)

As a musician, songwriter, and visual artist, Ash Brooks’ work has unfolded across dozens of releases in Flower Room’s discography over the past three years. Whether through the wildly prolific ambient project Starbirthed or the experimental psych-folk duo Ash & Herb (both in collaboration with Matt LaJoie), her voice and vision has lighted a path to incorporating dream-wisdom and divine feminine Earth-and-cosmos worship within varied expressions of ultraconscious experience. Yet, this was a discography lacking its truest origin story: Ash’s longtime DIY bedroom-recorded lo-fi dream-pop and psych folk solo songbook, incorporating both nocturnal fantasy and spiritual folktale into a more literary, narrative blend. After 2018’s Crown of Thyme cassette introduced the most tantalizingly abstract edges of Ash’s solo soundworld, her vinyl debut–for the most part written and recorded prior to Crown of Thyme–blows the door wide open on any expectations that may have arisen from this initial peek inside the Temple.

Work on Temple of the Roses predates all Flower Room material released to-date; beginning with Ash’s self-recorded demos, she and Matt worked on a series of 4-track cassette recordings of her songs from 2014-2016, before deciding to begin anew with a digital multitrack recorder offering more tracks and higher fidelity. Their move in June 2016 to Mount Misery in rural New Hampshire proved to be the boost the project–then called Rana Mu–required to fully lift off the ground. Awash in gothic ghost stories, civil rights lore, and New England underground music legend, life among psych jammers Soft Eyes and John Andrews at the former orphanage seeped into the arrangement and production of Ash’s new solo recordings instantly – even showing up verite-style in the form of distant birdsong and acoustic guitar noodles drifting through summer’s open windows at the start of “Rana Mu”.

The EP opens with the instrumental improvisation “Shasta”, named after and evoking the magnetically mystical aura of that peak in California. Led by Ash’s lightly buzzing synth leads and drone bed, the thick atmosphere is wind-swept by guest Rachel Neveu (Cruel Heaven, Mmoss, Soft Eyes, The Yawns)’s flute improvisation and funneled into rhythm by tablas, tambourine, and bouncing bass. The flute’s unbroken breath leads into first single “Mage”; as the song materializes around the strum of Ash’s guitar, sitar plucks, free-range bass, and a multitracked percussion drive, Ash’s vocals emerge with a clarity, confidence, and melodic strength previously only hinted at in Crown of Thyme’s title track and highlight “Sanctify”. A psych-folk double-drummer groove falls into place as Ash’s vocals set the mystic scene, joined by incandescent flute and eventually giving way to an extended instrumental bridge that tunnels further into the heart of the trip with each cycle.

“Rana Mu” leads off side B, Ash’s gently-lilting dream-pop vocals shining atop a soft-focus arrangement and production that highlights both the experimentation (the tremolo’ed-to-ten electric fuzz guitar was recorded with amplifier at the bottom of a stairwell and the microphone recording it at the top) and pop aspirations at the core of her solo work. With each guitar, vocal, and synth line given space to reverberate and sink into the field, the track is lifted on the hazy strands of warm summer air – a mirage of radio signals commingling past and future. Temple of the Roses closes on its newest recording, “Realm of Sight”. Recorded in Summer 2018–a full two years after the sessions that produced the bulk of the EP–the song adds an extra element of creeping mystery and shadow-lurk to the collection, tying connecting ribbons to both Crown of Thyme and the Woven in the Fabric outtakes. A minor key ballad that rises above the murk of dirge on the strength of levitating vocals and synth, the song’s hallucinatory blasts of wooden flute and churchly chimes both deepen the mystery and light the road ahead. After hearing “Realm of Sight” close the book on Temple of the Roses, one is tempted to envision a parallel universe in which this is the folk music played at a sacred ritual, or the pop music danced to at a deep-woods ceremonial reception.

Limited to 100! Eco-friendly full-color gatefold digipak & professionally-duplicated CD-R that combines both the Temple of the Roses EP and the Woven in the Fabric bonus cassette tracks. Includes full lyrics sheet for both EPs in the gatefold.

Note: disc is playable on all CD drives and players with CD-R playback capability, but may not be able to be read by older CD units.

Released May 22, 2020