This is a psychedelic album with a box set’s worth of ideas, moods and textures. After its tracks and creator bounced between the two energy centers of Glastonbury and Los Angeles, California, a massive period of gestation came to a close when all the myriad sonic disturbances and finely-detailed arrangements were synthesized into an imprinted catalogue of Dimorphodons headman Will Twynham’s excitatory neurotransmitters firing off continuous communications between neutrons in synaptic transmission like a subatomic pinball game in his overladen terminals, where every score and tilt were stored for years until ultimately translated and incorporated into the sounds, sensations, and vibrations of this very album, WAUI.

WAUI maintains flight paths of fancy that direct to the unknown at many points (and even more levels) inducing sudden strong feelings of thrilling excitement or even: fear. Despite the lush arrangements and soaring vocal harmonies, the album’s movements are cut sharply and directly whilst Twynham’s vocals throw shapes against the roaring silence, and create moods from timbral expression. Once set within and without the vocal harmonies that weave throughout and tightly arranged in the loosest way possible, the result is a diffusive yet finely tuned bouquet of balance, counterpoint and contrary motion. Although set deep in chambers of phase, reverb and/or a battery of effects that shape their emotional tone, the vocals are positioned behind canvases gestured with musical interludes ranging from the sublimed to the substantially heavy.

“Searching For Dimorphodons” kicks off the album with double bass drumming, double cymbal crashing, and double mindfucking shifting panels of sound into a stunning kaleidoscope of shards flying from/into quad-ply dimensions. Reprised from Dimorphodons’ SEARCHING FOR DIMORPHODONS EP, it’s a jagged time lapse and repeating groove that has the same regenerative qualities of an ever-blossoming fractal continuing into infinity for infinity and through infinity. The succession of rhythmic waves arc, discharge, and crash as they’re propelled by the clatterfest of drumming shot through by dual lead guitars pummeling thru the rhythm with attack and feedback as they trample over the fragile lead vocals-as-backing-vocals intonations. Truly spectacular psychedelic heavy metal.

Having lived with the EP for half a decade, it’s disorienting to have something completely different erupt once the smoke clears. Even more so when it’s a super phased and reverbed antechamber that leads directly into “Every Animal.” Streaking across a multitude of influences as it nails its centre with four on the floor drumming, at points electro-clash fragments embed into its elbows whilst it crawls across a panoply of errant styles where Carnaby Street and Studio 54 meet in a freak time-space shift into eternal continuum. Then again, Dimorphodons is a collective, vertical sweep across the horizon of music genres that render those terms irrelevant while holding aloft the best fragments gleaned from the past, now flung into the basket of the future and forevermore. 

To that end, “Slave To Rough” is a searing blast of proto-metal sludge the way it was meant to be: inchoate, fumbling, and scouring for meaning in a fruitless universe. Grounded to the earth while flying through the sky, frissons explode with each backing vocal response to Twynham’s liquid-phased vocal calls. Suddenly, flanking classic ’67 Traffic harmony vox beam down from the heavens reinforcing the perplexing couplet: “Down down baby deeper and down IS a record by the Status Quo / Not their worst one though.” All is heading sideways down, down and down and the last thing he recalls is that Francis Rossi may still be the bossi? Whoa — a truly picturesque matchstickable message, or what? Heading sideways down as consciousness moves into an alternative reality, Twynham’s vocals are transferred through filters that send out rippling phase and reverb upon them from the cavern of knowing. Surrounded by random bleeps. Blue Cheer speed (slow), Blue Cheer volume (loud), and Blue Cheer heaviness (burden of existence level) until it seems the tape has stretching because it wasn’t rewound properly, causing inadvertent phasing to dampen the proceedings far down, down…That is, until a slight return at doubled-down strength. Excellent.

“Grimpen Mire” sees Beach Boys ‘66 vocals break out like the crossfade from “Surf’s Up” into “Child Is Father To The Man” in trudging bog step tempo. Offset by twinkling synthesizers which gather and ring in stars around melancholy voicings, a synthesizer outro in and around the peat bog that circles in and around the lake, draws this near-RJ McKendree WALLFLOWER outtake to a close.

“Land Over Sea” opens with great lumbering stride rhythm, slow as hell lumpen guitar bursts and with feedback leakage throughout. The pattern is churned up and frothing with white wave crash upon a coastline in tempest straits. In direct contrast is the gentle and damaged “Gondwanaland.” A message in a bottle that reached a shore ages ago is intoned by Twynham’s paper-thin, snaking vocals through a mist of phased whatevernesses. A mass of melancholy melodies plead thru the voicings, then fall away… Followed by gentle synthesizer trails and broken fragments of guitar lines until the mist envelops all but distant railway tracks rhythms until they also fade into silence. The mood of languid liquidity flows into the next track, “I Want You To Know.” Disembodied funeral drums bang out slowly somewhere in a misty beach long ago as gentle voices continue their uphill climb into oblivion as they dissolve from solid into liquid into gas and then: plasma. The dampened mood shifts midway when a sinewy guitar signature blossoms, as catchy yet simple as a successfully recalled musical sequence from a dream, decorated with a smattering of synthesizer trickling diffusely into eternal spray while the shifting picture once again changes form into one long, continuous, farewell.

“Stone Little Bird” is a reflection that keeps its electronic rhythms that buzz underneath whispery vocalizing trine to the surrounding circular paces. It soon all sinks into a magnitude of phasing comparable to the beginning of a homemade C‑90 cassette of Brian Eno’s MUSIC FOR FILMS — which adding an additional layer of phasing onto the already phased-to-hell beginning of “M386.”

A super phased and reverbed dub antechamber leads directly into the dream-like “Once I Was A Boy.” The voicings are set as though projecting their shadows upon screens as the backing music, operates as though a paper-thin after-image, an impression of a vivid sensation retained after the stimulus has ceased. The track then skedaddles away in quick mesmerisation.

“I Held The Monster Back” is a weary trudge back into silence, set against distantly-echoed drums that beat out solidly in the background whilst high-pitched harmony vocals raise to the heavens. Now at journey’s end, with all the multitude of ethereal set pieces of the album drawn to a close, the thrust of each drum hit signals another continent slowly slipping into the sea as random synthesizer scrawls dart across the sonic windscreen, signifying all shall be redeemed…Next stop: Pannotia.

Available in Vinyl, Compact Disc and Digital Album here.

WAUI ZAUI