Description:
Little Wolf Band is the brainchild of Native American producer Jim Wilson. He uses loops and samples to weave together tribal chant-based, trance-inducing music, centered on the music and ceremonies of his people, the Northern Cheyenne. Having helped launch the New Native American popular music genre (alongside rock luminary Robbie Robertson), Wilson has worked with such key figures as Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Coolidge. For Prayer to the Mystery, Wilson moves to realize his own deeply shamanistic, musical vision, a combination of deeply trance-inducing Native American rhythms and vocals with electronic sw
Little Wolf Band is the brainchild of Native American producer Jim Wilson. He uses loops and samples to weave together tribal chant-based, trance-inducing music, centered on the music and ceremonies of his people, the Northern Cheyenne. Having helped launch the New Native American popular music genre (alongside rock luminary Robbie Robertson), Wilson has worked with such key figures as Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Coolidge. For Prayer to the Mystery, Wilson moves to realize his own deeply shamanistic, musical vision, a combination of deeply trance-inducing Native American rhythms and vocals with electronic sweep and flow. The tracks on Prayer to the Mystery capture a strong gravitational pull via samples of tribal drumming and chanting along with synthesizers, flutes, guitars, and strings. It's the road into mystery paved with gold.
The title track sets the pace with a steady shaking of medicine sticks and the haunted wind of trilling wooden flutes, gradually giving way to a pounding drum set and sampled distant shamanistic cries. "Serpent Dance" writhes and pulses like the name implies, with a menacing, forest-floor stalking bass line, loping percussion, and Wolf's flute twittering like a panicked bird. As in previous tracks, ghostly Native American voices chant and conjure in the distant winds as wolves howl on the perception line of human hearing. Throughout there is the perception of the wild and mysterious lurking just outside the campfire’s perimeter, dangerous terrain but also empowering for those brave enough to tread there in search of their power animals.
"Hear Our Prayers" is the penultimate track, helping to close out the album on a note of plea and prayer for the future as a beautiful female voice sings with flutes and shakers, "Hear our prayers / Watch over us." You can feel the earth and sky answering this request in the naturalistic sonic warmth in which Wilson wraps her, warmed and comforted from the cold winds and pitiless blue skies, rooted in the dream-world flow of this talented musician's shamanic mixing. The sort of album you can play for days on end, Prayer to the Mystery only gets better as you go deeper into the mysteries of the ancients, mysteries Wilson knows better than to try and explain or harness to typical song structures. Instead you just go along with him and let the unknowable depths of your soul speak at this audience of elder ones, connecting you to the mystery's very heart.
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Manufacturer: New Earth Records
Release date: 9 September 2008
EAN: 7142662807238 UPC: 714266280723
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