Originally sold during the tour for 2009's spellbinding Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age,
Mother Is the Milky Way delivers more of that album's transporting, mystical experiments in song and sound collages. Where Trish Keenan and James Cargill's collaboration with the Focus Group's Julian House did indeed sound like supernatural transmissions, these pieces are slightly more grounded and concrete: there's a drowsy depth to the buzzing drones and beats that anchors the warbling flutes, birdsong, and Keenan's murmured musings about "a dream within the dream" on "In Here the World Begins." It's the equal of anything that appeared on Witch Cults, as is "Mother's Milk Means Music," a darkly sparkling excursion that brings the mini-album's orbit full circle.
Mother Is the Milky Way's elements collide so spontaneously that its pieces can feel almost offhanded, but they have far too much detail to be dismissed as unfinished. Children's laughter and sprightly electronics meander through "Elegant Elephant," leaving plenty of room for the song's folky underpinnings and Keenan's wordplay, which celebrates an ornament on the mantle in much the same way she imbued a broken clock with a winning personality on Haha Sound's "The Little Bell." Meanwhile, the sound effects and samples on "Never Trust a Rusty Bolt" reach a cartoonish level of absurdity. Above all,
Mother Is the Milky Way's mind-expanding layers exemplify
Broadcast's soft way of challenging conventional, hippy-dippy notions of what psychedelic music can be. On "I'm Just a Person in This Roomy Verse," the duo superimpose one of Keenan's dusty lullabies about perception with whispers, wild vocalizations, and the laughter of a studio audience, implying simultaneous states of consciousness. Cargill and Keenan make these different states of being more literal on "Milling Around the Village," a tour around a seemingly bucolic, Wicker Man-like enclave that slowly grows more sinister, and on "The Aphid Sleeps," where Keenan details a green world not much bigger than a dewdrop. At once rougher and more intricate than some of their earlier releases,
Mother Is the Milky Way finds
Broadcast "growing backwards," as one of its song titles puts it. That the magical-sounding direction they pursued here and on Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age was cut short by Keenan's untimely 2011 death remains a painful loss, but Warp's reissue of
Mother Is the Milky Way is a celebration of the singular beauty that
Broadcast shared with the world. ~ Heather Phares