Metcalf, Khalsa & Roach — Dream Tracker
The just over seventy minute album offers up six length tracks that sit between just under the ten minute mark to just over the twenty minute mark a piece. And the album as a whole is a satisfying, epic, often detailed percussive, warmly and dramatic harmonic journey into shamanic and aboriginal themed ethno percussive ambience. Sonically it’s mostly a fairly even split between Metcalf vivid & vibrate ethic percussion, Dashmesh Khalsa haunting Didgeridoo playing and his added percussive detailed with tabla & Hapi drum. And of course Steve Roach’s rich, mysterious and harmonic analog and digital synth textures, Roach also adds in some neat & haunting bullroarer playing and some subtle Australian field recordings of bird and other animal sounds.
The album really starts off it's first half been quite up-beat, bright and detailed in it’s ethic percussive detail; as if your on vivid, yet timeless journey through the day time Austrian out back. But as we move into the second half things become slightly slower, more mysterious, and right at the end of the album it becomes quite nocturnal & eerier giving the feeling the slowed pulse of a nocturnal Australian jungle, or cooling past mid-night planes of the Australian deserts. So like the best ambient albums you feel like you've been on a defined and holly rewarding sonic journey.
This is the third album that Metcalf and Roach have worked together, and it’s clear they complement and collaborate very well together. This is the first time Khalsa has worked with either Metcalf or Roach, but he works very nicely with the pair adding in his own identity and spirit to the mix. So in summing “Dream Tracker” is an highly rewarding and cliché free slice of dramatic and harmonic ethno ambience which is primed for dreams and trances that are a-drift with imagers of vast Australian deserts, jungles and places where man rarely steps.