Astral Magic- Meetings with the Universal Mind (Goldhat02)

Astral Magic (Santtu Laakso) is a very prolific Finnish musician and this is his 24th release (according to Discogs) and it is a compilation cassette tape that comes with a full colour magazine and features music that had only previously been released in a digital form from the first 4 bandcamp releases from 2020-21.  77 mins!!  While Santtu plays most of the instruments, Jonathan Segel, who has contributed guitar, violin and other instruments on nearly half of Santtu¨s releases plays on 3 tracks. Peter Bingham is on track A7 but the rest is Santtu. 

The 12 page zine is super cool graphics. The mag starts with a page about the release and ethos of the magazine. Page 2 is Santtu writing about the project, the ethos, the experiment, styles and coconspirators… Page 4 and 5 Santtu goes through all the tracks on the compilation in detail. Page 6 and 7 features myself and Jonthan Segel writing about Santtu and Astral Magic. A personal view. The last 5 pages of the mag is a detailed discography, which incredibly impressive when you think that all of this material has come out in the last 3 years.. Release 25 is already out as well and called Alien Visitations, on cassette on the Noiseagonymayhem Records label out of Canada.

Anyway, if you are a fan of psychedelic space rock music, it is well worth checking out Astral Magic. What to recommend???  I really dig Visions of Infinity (of course, I mixed it and these songs really got into my head!), Mists of Orion, and Lords of Space…..  

http://darksun.bandcamp.com

http://facebook.com/AstralMagicMusic