The Bog is back and Bogger than ever. His cavity inducing Krystil-clear psych riffs, suspended in jellied electronics are anything but Earthly. Peat and Repeat were sitting on a bridge. Peat fell off. Into infinity. Here's the map. Rinse and repeat. Bog has a real talent both for playing and composition. His musicks are weighted with heavy doses of classic late 60's lysergic lytergics, but his brand of 'delics are uniquely scented by the new millennium. Cosmic, deep, spiraling, melodic, contagious, sexy, weird, rock, roll, trance, pants. Earthmonkey wields these and more. The Monkey lays down on Broadway. To sleep, perchance to dream of Morpheus.

Earthmonkey ‘alms of Morpheus’ (beta lactam ring). Now counting aside Wizards Tell Lies and the Wizards of Twiddly albums if there’s one release that we’ve found ourselves continually gravitating back to in recent times it’s the latest opus from Earthmonkey. Some time disciple of the extended Stapleton / NWW family, the monkey one has been freaking the collected minds and record decks of the wasted and wayward for several years now. ’alms of Morpheus’ sees him jet hopping to the farthest reaches of the mind mapped upon an axis where the straying strands of progressive, kraut, trance and psych converge to defy lazy categorization. An awesome two disc set of warping bliss fuelled out there groove, a perception filter altering odyssey that clocks in at over 2 and a half hours of sublime mood morphing mirages, its Floyd-y yet not Floyd-y if you get my drift (see the mellowed magisterial introspection of ‘larva lamp‘)- here you’ll find those token Floyd influences bleached and burnt upon a mindset informed by Tangerine Dream and Amon Duul II and while the mere mention of that hallowed trio may rightly have your appetites a whetted the Monkey isn’t rested there - just yet - for he blends a seamless hallucinogenic hybrid upon whose melodic matrix an truly expansive aural palette is filleted and filtered through a lysergic viewfinder whereupon elements drawn from the cosmic ambi-scapes of Bill Laswell (given its loose fitted subtle cosmic jazz indents), the more scenic trajectories of a youthful Porcupine Tree, Ozric Tentacles (albeit cross matched with Neu especially on the scatterbrain kraut purged mutant psyche blues space funk of the middle eastern ‘mudskip moon stomp‘), the future sound of London, biosphere and above all the magic mushroom band dissipate, dilute and shape shift with such chilled out ease that you half suspect the blighter has been recorded in a walk in freezer rather than within the orbit of some new born star at the furthest point of view. As said previously 2 discs, 2 and a half hours of trance like terra-formations sub divided into 19 interlocking suites whose enjoyment no doubt begs enhancement by the skinning up of a fat one - peppered with transcendental montages, lunar whispers and flavoured by lazy eyed lounge lilts (’break it down‘), fractious atmospherics (the fried flashback dark star dislocation of ’alms of mopheus’), wig flipped ’maggot brain’ freak outs rephrased by psychic TV (’hed phood 4 phat people’), vintage coiled motorik grooves the envy of klangbad and looped laid back funk strobes (as on the Ka Spell-esque ’new cheese’), ’alms of Morpheus’ has all the accoutrements of some recently discovered thought lost late 60’s acid head nugget. ’I’m just a naked man screaming here’ literally oozes retro from its very grooves whilst spiking your headspace with its kaleidoscopic brew of wasted wah wah’s, foot to pedal growling big bearded riffs and woozy head expanding electro swirls. Then there’s the trip wired concentric dream weaving mirages sumptuous freewheeling from the core of ’it’s down’ with its heavily intoxicating Australasian signatures sounding not unlike like a spaced out meditation with Sadar Bazaar, ‘moon loop’ era Porcupine Tree and Transglobal Underground in attendance. Personally we were taken by ’night blossom’ given its adeptness to straddle at once the ambient, trance and space rock camps, both sophisticated and demurring it imagines a streamlined syncopating sounds cape for a futuristic galactic highway of sorts as dinked by the collective morphing of an early career Yello and an ’Oxygene’ era Jean Michel Jarre. ‘alms of Morpheus’ is an epic voyage from which we suspect a few curious cosmic cadets won’t return from. Mark Barton/lostintoday.com

PEAT BOG-EARTHMONKEY, A BRIEF HISTORY.
Peat Bog's formative years were largely spent casting about the English countryside with The Convoy; a conflagration of acid crazed, medieval brigands (see also "hippies"), who traveled en masse via an armada of beaten old trucks & buses, making their homes in teepees and living as freely as possible. While tuning in and dropping out with this loose collective, Bog began to ingest not only psychedelic drugs, but also psychedelic music. From The Mothers Of Invention to Chrome, Bog was a head for it all. It wasn't long before he began to bake the minds of others with his own brand of trance inducing (and induced) music. It was with this burgeoning sense of a musical universe that Peat Bog moved to Ireland in 1989. Eventually settling in County Claire in 1992, Bog found kindred spirits in Ruby Wallis and in the family Stapleton. The Stapletons' pseudo-nomadic lifestyle, traveling by horses and wagons, appealed to Bog, and so he found himself as something of an auxiliary family member. In 1993 Steve Stapleton asked Bog if he would like to sit in on recording sessions for a Nurse With Wound track slated for the compilation album "50 Years Of Sunshine" (a musical tribute to the 50 years since Albert Hoffmann first stumbled upon LSD 25). As it happened, Bog had just the right experience in both music and Sunshine usage. Thus was born another Nurse With Wound adjutant who would later appear on such NWW albums as "Who Can I Turn To Stereo," "An Awkward Pause," "Alice The Goon," "Funeral Music For Perez Prado" and "Rock And Roll Station," as well as other projects. Concurrently, Peatbog performed with a band called The Big Bag Of Stix. This group was known for playing grueling three hour sets of tweaked out, Irish punk/traditional. Quoth a member of the band: "Bog would go mental on percussion and didgeridoo." 1995 saw the birth of Peat Bog and Ruby Wallace's child Freddy. It was at this time that Bog started to work with the band The Inflatable Sideshow. With Darragh Greally and some assistance from Stapleton, the "Bonefrequency" track was completed in 1996 and appeared on the "Foxtrot" compilation LP. The Inflatable Sideshow then spent quite some time touring Ireland and the European continent. In the late 90's, some friends asked if they could use a selection of Bog's home recordings for their Burning Man documentary, "Dust Devils." This suggestion dovetailed nicely with the new musical notions percolating in Bog's mind. Inspired by memories of similar festivals in the UK, Bog elicited the help of Andile Meeshec, Molly Gowen and Ian Cahill, and a series of pieces were created for the film under the new project name; Earthmonkey. The music finally used in the film appears as tracks 6 & 7 on Earthmonkey's "Audiosapien" album, released by Beta-lactam Ring Records in 2003.