Jakob Battick – ‘Rabbit’s Moon’ (2021)
Some music you control, some music controls you, yet every once in awhile an album floats onto my turntable that’s so unexpected, an album that ebbs and flows like warm waves lapping at the beach, like the concentric circles that flow back from a stone skipped across a pond.
Such is ‘Rabbit’s Moon’, a hypnotic pastoral soundscape filled with wonder and delight, an album that immerses itself around you, inspiring you to engage in free-form thought, an album filled with enunciations of inspiration.
Jakob Battick is not new to the game, he’s several albums tailing after him, with this outing being a raptured culmination of all that those previous recordings brought to light. I’d sincerely like to suggest that his music is darkly, even hushly psychedelic (embracing drone and hypnotic sounds within a folk framework, pushing the concept of the ‘song’ itself into strange and farther out places), ardent, absolutely experimental, honest and certainly bewildering, with his sound and verse revealed with slow motion intoxication. It would be easy to suggest that these songs have been recently found, the product of another time, though truth is, this music rises up from the earth, dripping with morning dew, romantic meditations on stillness, tugging at my shirtsleeves while indulging me with a pleasant bodily heaviness, bringing a sly sleepy nod to my eyes as I strain to pay attention.
Jakob’s vocals are hauntingly deep, nearly weary, decidedly weathered, delivered over a background of swirling musical wanderlust. So here I lay, reality a thousand miles away, vaguely aware of my cat asleep on my chest, while like a wayward disembodied ghost, Jakob quietly strolls through my listening space, hand extended … ready to take me under.
*** The Fun Facts: The album has been titled after the Kenneth Anger film by the same name, with the outing finding its way to you as a limited edition of 100 copies on transparent purple vinyl, along with 100 copies pressed to standard black.
There will also be a most interesting release of 100 purple cassettes. When I asked Jakob about the cassettes he said, “Some of the cassettes we used to record this album were someone’s old home copies of speeches by Osho; the leader of the Rajneeshi movement. We discovered the tapes abandoned and burned-out in Berkeley. When I saw the labels affixed to these tapes, I knew I had to have them, to tinker with them for this recording. On a side note, all of the material embraces the moon, saints and martyrs, an esoteric searching of sorts … don’t know why, but I felt there was a connection that needed to be made, but there was, so I did.”
Double sided insert with complete lyrics …
Jenell Kesler
Jakob Battick – ‘Rabbit’s Moon’ (2021)
