Why does echo sound so magical? Why do reverberations - from psychedelia and dub to ambient and avant-rock - evoke the sacred? Maybe it's because they hark back to when our prehistoric ancestors enacted rites in caves and grottoes, or maybe it's an echo of our personal prehistory: womb-time, when sound reaches the unborn chils via the fleshly amplifier of the mother's body - ultra-resonant, dubbed up. Whatever the precise sonic implements deployed (guitars with Labradford and Flying Saucer Attack, digital technology with Me-Sheen and Single Cell Orchestra), the primary instruments used by most of the artists on this compilation are echo, reverb and delay. These they use to create space - vast and enfolding or cavernous and desolate. Sometimes the effect is blissfull, conjuring up an "intimate immensity". Sometimes it's unnerving, a miasma in which the self succumbs to non-differentiation. But whether it offers nirvana or entropy, one thig is clear: ambience isn't just a logical extension of psychedelic music, it is psychedelia's "endless end" - an ever-receding frontier.
Music to fly by