Imagine a cosmic portal opening – and all the most powerful, stirring sounds and rhythms of aeons of history, other galaxies and a billion dimensions pouring through at once, somehow creating harmony… This was the Space Ritual we beheld when Sendelica and Acid Mothers Temple played cheek-by-jowl at Cardigan’s Cellar Bar.
For 17 years, the Cellar’s owner Steve Greenhalgh has been surprising us with incredible artists, supporting local musicians and filling the atmospheric 18th-century building with everything from poetry nights to gigs like this one: for sure the loudest and sweatiest gig in Wales this year. Cue massive sounds and frenzied grooving, blowing the spectral socks off the Cellar’s reputed spooks!
Local spacerock band Sendelica have been honing their craft for years. They’ve been ramping it up solidly, and this incarnation is their tightest yet. Their pulsating set created a heightened sensitivity in us, healing through elemental sound-vibration and depositing us – nicely liquid and with chakras cleansed – onto the next soundwave of joy, into the ancient, psy-filled spaces of Makoto Kawabata’s ancestors.
Kawabata formed his first band, The Dark Revolutionary Collective, as a teenager in what he describes as “backwoods Nara”, Japan, in 1978. They’d record on a four-track and overdub the master onto two cassette recorders, birthing a unique psych sound. Japanese music was evolving into punk, so they were largely ignored, the guitarist remembering, “I just played my music from my own cosmos”.
Acid Mothers Temple (and their satellite projects) formed in 1995 and first toured Europe in 1998. Connecting with Gong members Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth (check out their collaboration, Teapot In Ruins), and The Incredible String Band, they quickly found friends and supporters, building a powerful and majestic sound, both sweet and raucous.
Jyonson Tsu’s aura and charisma, paired with soaring vocals and guitar, complimented Higashi Hiroshi’s far-out, otherworldly synth, and Kawabata’s ethereal, mesmerising chords. Sawano Shozo’s dark-but-sweet, insistent bass drove the shamanic journey, as Satoshima Nani’s startling, psyche-wrenching, divinely insane drums took us to the wild thresholds of thrash and breakbeats via clever inserts of groove and funk.
This long-standing community of experimental artists know how to meld earth-shattering beats with fragility, sensitivity and heart. You can feel their more-than-musical togetherness and idealism as it radiates to us all. Acid Mothers Temple’s appearance at this open-hearted venue took us through the portal, and we were transformed; visit their multiverse soon. As for Sendelica, they next play the Cellar as part of Dr. Sardonicus’ Winter Dream, on Sat 25 and Sun 26 Feb.
Acid Mothers Temple / Sendelica, The Cellar, Cardigan, Mon 17 Oct
words JULIA DELI