It’s my suspicion that when an artist signs to Digitalis Industries, label proprietor Brad Rose sends a small package to their home, inside of which is a miniature bottle with a blue-ish tint, coupled with a small eye-dropper. The contents of the bottle, I'm guessing, is a grainy tincture, perhaps a combination of aged ergot and sage leaves. But whatever the ingredients, all Digitalis artists must be imbibing from this sacred elixir drawn possibly from the nymph-guarded golden fountain in Rose’s backyard. Though its effects aren’t as deleterious as the purple codeine and promethazine concoction that both fueled and ultimately felled Houston hip-hop icon DJ Screw, it is nonetheless potent and most likely geared more towards gently coaxing open the doors of perception and revealing hidden shamanic worlds. This is my guess, anyway, as to how such a wide spectrum of musicians on Digitalis all seem to be returning from their muse-seeking vision quests with such perfectly dove-tailing bits of cosmic wisdom.
Often centered around stringed instruments, modified electronics, and tribal percussion, Digitalis’ lineup is full of plickers and pluckers, homemade instrument-makers, and howling wind-cum-feedback-toolers. Like fellow Digitalis artists Ilyas Ahmed, Steve Gunn, and Los Pranks, Jeremy Kelley reaches back through eons of indigenous sounds to pull out inspiration for his debut self-titled CD. Hailing from the quaint historic burg of Hudson, NY, Kelley draws only slightly less from the psychotic maelstrom trauma brought on by fellow Hudson-ites Bunnybrains as those early American authors who called upstate New York their home, and drew on its nascent beauty to herald a burgeoning America. In fact, it’s in those rolling Hudson hills where Washington Irving’s bearded, narcoleptic protagonist took that notoriously long nap. And indeed it might be an interesting mental project to imagine Winkle waking up in 2008 to find a wooly group of new wave hippies enjoying a live forest jam from Kelley himself. While the sights and sounds of the Doepfer modular synth heavily featured on tracks like “Beyond the River Skai” would have him running for the hills, the pleasant Appalachian Fahey-isms plucked from Kelley’s guitar on tracks like “August Bootfire” and “August’s Wake” might relax the old geezer into taking another lengthy snooze.
Kelley’s music is one that thrives on subtle timbre variations. The softly crashing cymbals of “Blood of the Cauldron Maker” accentuates Kelley’s guitar, making it breathe fire, while a guest spot from Antique Brother’s Ged Gengras has him joining in on the Persian saz, adding a flavor of Middle Eastern stringed instruments previously explored by the likes of Sir Richard Bishop.
Kelley’s debut is choc full o’ dichotomies; the dark ambient synth work of “Beyond the River Skai” is the nightmarish yang to the preciously plucked yin of “August Bootfire.” And if opener “Rising Dawn,” with its softly strewn themes of rebirth, is the equivalent to the daytime saga of Joyce’s Ulysses, then “Polar Bodies,” with its rattling, e-bowed, fly-trapped-in-a-jar steel guitar, is more akin to the dream language of Finnegan’s Wake. It’s the flirting of these lines from which Kelley’s debut draws its power. Final track “White Light from the Black Sun,” whose title alone evokes drawing light from darkness, perfectly sums up the album, as its free-form psych workout eventually morphs into a softly howling cry, before dying out in the last embers of an imploding supernova.