This is some serious, deeply mind-expanding music. Not psychedelic with studio trickery or exotic trappings like sitars; psychedelic like handfuls of peyote and mushrooms in the desert in the middle of the night. This isn't pop music that grew out of the hippie counterculture in the '60s; this music comes from somewhere deep in the human psyche, a place humans have known or been acquainted with for thousands of years.
Shawn David McMillen's
Catfish is closer in spirit to the trance music of
les Gnawa or the Master Musicians of Joujouka than any western music most of the time. This is shamanistic music, designed to transport participants to other worlds. One hears acoustic guitar, some electric guitar, flute and gongs and cymbals along with other sound sources and an atmosphere of unknown origin. The pieces themselves exist out of time; there's a static quality but also a sense of a journey. "The Lawn" and "Old Bullets" take things a tiny step closer to Takoma guitar land in the sense that it sounds more like someone "playing guitar" in the traditional sense, but they remain very free-form excursions at the same time and still inhabit the same mysterious space as the other pieces. This is cosmic drone space music that taps into a secret place not many people go anymore: a place where logic and reasoning end and magic and mystery rule the day. Music for the journey inside.