Happy 10th Anniversary to Circles Around The Sun’s debut album Interludes For The Dead, originally released November 27, 2015.
Eleven minutes into “Hallucinate A Solution,” the opening track on Interludes For The Dead (2015), Adam MacDougall throws in an absolutely filthy organ lick. In a more composed track, it would be the lead-in for an extended solo, but not here. MacDougall recedes almost immediately, making space for the rest of the band. He’s turned up the temperature just enough to signal to guitarist Neal Casal that it’s time to ratchet up the intensity. Casal obliges with a blistering guitar lick of his own, with bassist Dan Horne throwing in counterpoint. The tune chugs along in this heightened state for another two minutes before Casal brings the solo to its natural conclusion and things cool off. There are still seven minutes left in the track. This is the kind of thing you get when you have the two ingredients that define this album: extremely talented improvisers well-versed in the jam tradition, and no expectations.
Interludes For The Dead, the debut record from Circles Around The Sun is a completely improvised record that nobody was supposed to hear. Or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to be the center of attention. Charged with recording intermission music for the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary concerts in San Francisco and Chicago in the summer of 2015, guitarist Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Hardworking Americans), keyboardist Adam McDougall (The Black Crowes, Chris Robinson Brotherhood), bassist Dan Horne (Grateful Shred), and drummer Mark Levy (The Congress) set up in a studio to record five hours of jams. It was elevator music, to be piped in over stadium speakers on the perimeter of the main event—certainly not looking for attention.
But people noticed. Amidst all the hubbub of the concerts, the psychedelic muzak caught enough people’s attention that the ensemble decided to release about half of it as an album: Interludes For The Dead.
It's an odd nexus of factors: Interludes was supposed to accommodate the sensibilities of Grateful Dead concertgoers, so it has a fealty to the experimental genre norms of the Dead’s music. And, it wasn’t intended for commercial release, so the song structures (and lengths) meander without any attention to commercial viability. But it wasn’t supposed to stand out; anything too experimental would overstep the confines of background music.
The result is highly listenable jam band material; melodic and wandering, digestible and exciting, bewildering but centered. The delirious labyrinths of some of the Grateful Dead’s experimental improvisation (think “Dark Star” or “Space”) are absent, as are the euphoric highs of more recent jam bands (nothing resembling the peak of Phish’s “Harry Hood,” for example). This middle-of-the-road approach yields a patient psychedelia that never drives off a cliff into the genre’s unlistenable excesses.
Listen to the Album:
Of course, fans of the jamband scene might consider polite, relatively low-risk improv to be antithetical to the whole scene. The joy of the jamband is to see a group play without a net, to experiment and push boundaries. When bands fail to do this, they often default to uninspired midtempo funk and jamming for the sake of jamming. Many bands have run aground on these rocky shores, trying to create something that sounds like improvisational music without any of the adventure.
This is where the real magic of Interludes For The Dead lives: even though it was supposed to be background music, giving the band license to churn out hours of generic grooves, the record manages to be both sonically diverse and full of true moments of inspired playing. Even if the band never fully jumps off a cliff, the spirit of the music is alive and well.
Take “Kasey’s Bones,” a track that runs on a tight drum groove. After ten consistent minutes in this mode, Casal pulls out a descending lick that diverges from the vocabulary he had been using previously. MacDougall picks up on this immediately, abandoning his three-note refrain, switching to a synthesizer and breaking up the original groove. This gives Casal freedom to expand his palette. After just a minute, the song is wholly transformed, evolving further, until even Levy’s groove finds a completely new mode. The next five minutes absolutely cook, Casal’s playing getting increasingly frantic, until it comes to a collective peak…and the band pumps the brakes as one. As the track gets quieter, Levy lays out and makes room for several minutes of ambient improvisation. Definitely not polite, inoffensive jamband material.
The spirit of the jam tradition also lives in the references to the Grateful Dead’s songbook that are scattered throughout the tracklist. “Space Wheel” references “The Wheel,” while “Kasey’s Bones” shares DNA with “Shakedown Street” and “Hat and Cane” gestures to “Bird Song.” These references both anchor the record in its musical heritage and offer enough inspiration to keep the individual tracks on the record distinct from one another.
Interludes For The Dead then succeeds in doing something nearly impossible: it’s compelling but unobtrusive, referential but distinct. It launched a band that was never supposed to happen—an act of spontaneous generation fully in the spirit of the improvisational music world.
Listen: