Farthest South, Spheres & Constellations

"You'll know when you get there," as the Herbie Hancock song has it and the Bob Gluck book on the early electric period Hancock band Mwandishi reminds us. But when you start there, you also know. The Israeli trio Farthest South has nothing much to do with Mwandishi, save a particular way with electronically enhanced sounds. They begin in a place where some of the zoner late-'60s early-'70s bands ended up.

That is, they have a very sustained a-rhythmic soundscape approach that blends the keys and guitars of Barry Berko, the electric bass and effects of Yair Yona and the analog synths of Yair Etziony.

Their album Spheres & Constellations (self-released) is drone-zone space music all the way. It is at once cosmic, psychedelic, yet evolves in a controlled sort of fashion.

If you like a concentrated dose of ambient space, this will be for you. It is less a music of individual instrumental utterances and more a collective, orchestrated, cosmic OM .

And within the world it occupies it wholly succeeds. Board your rockets now, space explorers. The flight is about to begin. A serious immersion, an all-enveloping wash in the stratospheric milky way can be yours with this one if you have the spirit for it!