Musicians Featured:

• Tabor Allen - drums

• Ben Lumsdaine - drums

• Billy Mohler - double bass

• Isaiah Morfin - synth bass

• Jeff Parker - electric guitar

• Alex Sadnik - alto sax

• Chris Schlarb - electric guitar, electronics

• Heather Sommerhauser - synthesizer

Cover Artwork:

• Back cover photography by Devin O’Brien

• Artwork and layout by David Woodruff

Liner Notes:

We begin in the void, as we always do. Endless skies. Black night sighs. Space is the place, but in solitude, an empty embrace.

But in the darkness still we find an obsidian shimmer. Heather Sommerhauser drones starless synthesizer tones. Billy Mohler’s upright bass sculpts the cosmic web. It quickens; it thickens. It recedes; it gives slow shape to chaos. Then at drummer Ben Lumsdaine’s sudden rat-a-tat crescendo, everything snaps into place.

Welcome to Plays Planet Caravan. Chris Schlarb helms Psychic Temple, the decade-spanning, member-fluid group that revels in wild combinations. With little more than a short demo and basic charts, these eight musicians based in Southern California— some of whom had never played together— recorded these two side-long excavations at Schlarb’s BIG EGO studio on a single Sunday afternoon.

An extended version of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” had been cookin’ in Schlarb’s restless mind since growing up on his parents’ music— including his dad’s “total weirdo taste,” as he describes it. In a faux-leather cassette case,

young Schlarb would open the spring latch and find Devo, Led Zeppelin, Moody Blues and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. “And there was a copy of Paranoid in there.”

He doesn’t know when “Planet Caravan” became an obsession. The psychedelic love ballad was an outlier on the heavy metal band’s second album of 1970. With starry-eyed lyrics penned by bassist Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne sings gingerly through a Leslie speaker as Bill Ward softly jams congas. Tony Iommi indulges his love for Django Reinhardt— an early influence as another guitarist who lost fingers to injury— with jazz manouche mysticism.

“That melody is so great in the original,” Schlarb effuses.“It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s very understated. Like, why doesn’t this song last forever?”

Schlarb has played with this concept before: Recontextualize a cult tune with a large, improvised ensemble on the A-side, and write an original companion piece for the flip. But he didn’t want this record to be exactly like 2016’s Plays Music for Airports, which set Brian Eno’s layered tape-loop composition to live instrumentation and a riotous spiritualism.
“I didn’t want the same band and I didn’t want the same approach,” he explains.

Instead of a singer— and some were considered — two alto saxophonists take the melody.
Alex Sadnik states the theme rather matter of factly, though not without existential mourning, as Isaiah Morfin responds by re-contouring the shape, dragging notes across the crimson eye of great god Mars. Jeff Parker takes the first guitar solo, his spiderweb fretwork spinning around the two-chord hustle, locking into drummer Ben Lumsdaine’s pocket full of funk.

Tabor Allen, Psychic Temple’s secret weapon and most consistent drummer, plays colors. “He’s on top of the beat, around the beat and through the beat,” says Schlarb.

Schlarb himself is in rare form. A pristine guitar tone becomes more warped (as he slams the tape echo) and weird as the improvisation progresses, dive bombing on fried fuzz fractals of fusion shred. “What were you tripping on, man?!” engineer Devin O’Brien exclaimed.

But there’s more than a lifelong dream fulfilled. Schlarb often bills these sessions to uplift emerging talent, or to shift our impressions of them. Isaiah Morfin (Izzy & the Fins) and Heather Sommerhauser ( Junatime) are both making records for the BIG EGO label in 2022. “They’re multi-dimensional musicians who make pop-adjacent music, but so did Arthur Russell,” Schlarb argues. “They’re going to give it everything they have because it’s the opportunity for them to prove themselves in a different arena.”

That’s apparent on “Essaouira.” Schlarb found the rubbery, guembri-inspired bass line on an old voice memo labeled Desert Trance Blues; a slingshot melody quickly unfolded as a tribute to Gnawa music of Morocco. Bursting at the seams, it’s a full-band workout as musicians go their own ways and meet back in the middle to recapitulate and redouble the refrain.

“If the melody’s not good,” Schlarb explains, “the band can’t believe in the rest of the song.” Got room on that caravan?

—Lars Gotrich, Washington, D.C.