'Subconsciousology' is a full reworking of Dot Allison’s 2023’s 'Consciousology', by producer Lomond Campbell, who, as the title suggests, has made it deeper, darker and dancier.

Whereas the original album was all ornate avant-garde folk and psychedelic explorations, this new take is as hard-hitting as it is heavenly, as beat-driven as it is beautiful, and crucially it finds Dot re-embracing the electronic music with which she first made her name in One Dove.

“I love that Lomond has brought a rich musicality and has created wild universes around the elements he has chosen to retain in the various songs,” adds Dot. “It reminds me of working with Andrew Weatherall in a way, where the mixes were bold and reinventive departures.

“The whole concept of the original record is about interconnectivity and the electromagnetic aspects to consciousness, so the remixed version is like a rainbow diffracted from a beam of light.”

Everything in this pot of gold sounds and feels at once familiar but different – from the chugging electro of ‘Unchanged’ and ‘Bleached By The Sun’, to the almost absurd, Aphex Twin-like shock of ‘220Hz’ and the closer ‘Weeping Roses’, which is twisted from a Tim Hardin-style lament into the most unlikely acid house banger.

“Dot has a real knack for creating striking melodies that hit quickly and stay with you,” says Lomond. “I tried to build different chord structures around those vocal lines, re-harmonising to take it to darker places.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly accomplished selection of reworks of Dot Allison's stunning source material, turning Allison's dreamy vocals into glitched soundscapes and rhythmic echoes. Though the original material is the same, it gives a completely different perspective on the wonderfully composed pieces. Bangers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Shyness Of Crowns (Lomond Campbell Remix)
2. Unchanged (Lomond Campbell Remix)
3. Bleached By The Sun (Lomond Campbell Remix)
4. Moon Flowers (Lomond Campbell Remix)
5. 220Hz (Lomond Campbell Remix)
6. Double Rainbow (Lomond Campbell Remix)
7. Milk And Honey (Lomond Campbell Remix)
8. Mother Tree (Lomond Campbell Remix)
9. Weeping Roses (Lomond Campbell Remix)

Recorded remotely in Berlin and Scotland during lockdown, Dot Allison and Anton Newcombe collaborate as All Seeing Dolls. Produced by Anton Newcombe in Berlin, he and Dot would send each other vocal and musical ideas, blending Dot’s haunting vocals with their fellow skills as a multi- instrumentalists. The album features guitar, ukulele, piano and auto-harp played by Dot, alongside additional contributions from Hakon Adalsteinsson (guitar), & Uri Rennert (drums) .

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Huge walls of intricate psychedelic folk instrumentation and overarching, reverbed vocal could easily make for a muddy mess but the bright clarity of the instruments here make the grand, sweeping instrumentation and perfect meeting of minds all the sweeter. Brilliantly rich, euphoric psychedelic music.

TRACK LISTING

1. That’s Amazing Grace
2. Kaleidoscope
3. Blossoms In Her Mind
4. Sirens Echo In An Iron Lung
5. Non Waltz
6. I Believe You About The Moon
7. What Do Dolls Dream?
8. Time
9. Lady Buzz Killer

Anton Newcombe is the founder, the sole constant and the creative mastermind at the centre of one of music’s most fascinating bands; Brian Jonestown Massacre. He’s a frontman, songwriter, composer, studio owner, multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer, father and force of nature. There have been 21 BJM albums over the last 30 years, each embarking on their own mind-expanding adventure and exploring the outer realms of rock’n’roll; psychedelic rock, country-blues, snarling rock’n’roll, blissed-out noise-pop and more. Newcombe has established himself as a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a revolutionary force in modern music and an underground hero.

Dot Allison released her debut solo album Afterglow in 1999. Over the years she has strived to keep the listener on a journey – and herself too. She revolts against what she has done before, to evolve and not just occupy the same space. That journey has taken her from Afterglow’s broad church (trip-hop, Tim Buckley-esque ballads, dance tracks, chilled psychedelia) to the sultry synth-pop of We Are Science (2002), the lush, baroque Exaltation Of Larks (2007) and the eclectic, rootsy drama of Room 7½ (2009). After a hiatus to raise her family she returned with the graceful acoustic folk record Heart-Shaped Scars (2021) and the haunting, barely there beauty of Consciousology (2023). The range of guest stars on Allison’s records is equally broad: where else would you find a cast list that includes Kevin Shields, Hal David, Paul Weller, Pete Doherty and Darren Emerson. Likewise, Allison’s own guest roles with the likes of Massive Attack, Scott Walker, Slam, Philip Shepard, The Babyshambles & Pete Doherty, underlining the huge respect her peers hold her in

TRACK LISTING

1. That's Amazing Grace
2. Siren's Echo Iron Lung

Dot Allison returns with a new solo album, Consciousology. After over a decade away, the former One Dove singer and songwriter broke cover in 2021 with Heart-Shaped Scars and this new album follows just two years later, as she hits a purple patch of songwriting. It’s also her first full release for Sonic Cathedral after contributing to Mark Peters’ acclaimed Red Sunset Dreams last year.

Consciousology finds multi-instrumentalist Dot joined by the London Contemporary Orchestra, her new labelmate Andy Bell from Ride, who plays guitar on two tracks, and Hannah Peel, who is responsible for some of the string arrangements with both the LCO and a stellar group of Scottish string players. It expands on the styles and themes of the previous album, all while pushing everything just that little bit further – the songs sound bigger, more avant-garde and experimental and, occasionally, properly out-there and psychedelic.

“I wanted to make some albums that felt like a set, exploring love, what lies beyond the visible and how all these aspects dovetail together,” explains Dot. “I see Consciousology a more psych Heart-Shaped Scars with a far fuller, more immersive sound and so, in that sense, it’s a more wayward, bolder, rule-breaking partner.”

Right from the eye-catching artwork by PJ Harvey collaborator Maria Mochnacz it definitely does not play it safe. It veers from the techno-played-as-folk of opener ‘Shyness Of Crowns’ and ‘220Hz’ and the Linda Perhacs-meets-The Velvet Underground chug of the first single ‘Unchanged’ to the Mercury Rev-style fantasia of ‘Bleached By The Sun’, the Brian Wilson-esque harmonies of ‘Moon Flowers’ and the kaleidoscopic colour trip of ‘Double Rainbow’. Elsewhere there are echoes of Desertshore-era Nico, Jack Nitzsche’s work with Neil Young, Karen Dalton and Anne Briggs before the relative simplicity of the Tim Hardin-inspired closer ‘Weeping Roses’. It’s a brilliant, breathtaking record.

The title, which brings to mind Maureen Lipman’s classic 1980s BT adverts (“you get an ’ology, you’re a scientist!”) might feel playful and light-hearted at first, but has a much deeper meaning, and one which makes sense of the album’s dedication to its biggest influences: Dot’s musician mother and botanist father.

“For me, it is an imagined voice of a conscious universe expressed through music,” explains Dot of the over-arching concept. “It’s a plea, an embrace, a longing, a last gasp, perhaps… imbued through the music, voice, harmony and a harmonic composition, with the lyrics taking an interest in the differing levels of consciousness apparent in all self-organising, natural systems.

“It takes a less mechanistic, inanimate but more infinitely complex view of the nature of reality and how feelings of love and loss – and consciousness itself – are potentially less ‘molecular’ in nature and more electromagnetic.”

The choice of instrumentation reflects this: there is a Theremin on two songs (played by Dorit Chrysler) because it works by generating electromagnetic fields around two antennae. “It uses fields that are beyond the reach of our senses, that lie outwith the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum,” says Dot. “To me, conceptually, this completely works with the ideas behind the album.”

For ‘Double Rainbow’, she went one further and actually recorded the electrical activity in a plant which was then translated into pitch variations.

“So, in effect, it has a guest performance from a botanical session player,” she laughs. “I placed a Brachyglottis Sunshine on top of the Steinway grand piano at the studio and recorded its ‘voice’ through a Neumann U67. It was pretty endearing and really moving to hear this translated into a melody.”

‘Double Rainbow’ was actually the starting point for the album; written at the same time as the songs on Heart-Shaped Scars, Dot felt it belonged somewhere else, and here it beds in perfectly alongside the similarly horticulturally inclined ‘Shyness Of Crowns’ (“the title relates to the behaviour of trees and how they socially distance at the crown of the woods”), ‘220Hz’ (“the frequency at which tree roots communicate beneath the ground in the ‘wood wide web’”) and ‘Mother Tree’ (inspired by Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard’s writings on the trees which act as central hubs for vast below-ground mycorrhizal networks.)

Expanding on the theme, ‘Moon Flowers’ is about recognising “our synergistic place in the complex network of all life and to respect the living quantum systems we seem intent on continually interrupting”, while ‘Bleached By The Sun’ includes the lyric “in our roots there is soul, an innate empathy”. “It’s an appeal that can be construed as a love song,” says Dot, “but in my mind was what nature might say should nature be able to be heard.”

‘Unchanged’ is a love song, albeit one about “being in a process with someone where you love, lose and grieve the love-bond alone, while the other person appears to remain unchanged throughout”. It’s powerful and driving, the opposite of the closing track, ‘Weeping Roses’. Inspired by a tape gifted to Dot in the ’90s by the late Andrew Weatherall which included two songs by Tim Hardin (‘How Can We Hang On To A Dream’ and ‘If I Were A Carpenter’), it ends this majestic and mind-expanding album on a perfect note of intimate simplicity.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another unbelievably rich, impeccably conceived collection from Dot Allison, charting monolithic highs and subtle, downplayed lows in her own inimitable style. Veering on the edge of the avant garde, but staying within the boundaries of pop music, Allison's in top form here, and the LP and CD are both presented in a beautiful package too, what more could you want. Essential purchase.

TRACK LISTING

1. Shyness Of Crowns
2. Unchanged
3. Bleached By The Sun
4. Moon Flowers
5. 220Hz
6. Double Rainbow
7. Milk And Honey
8. Mother Tree
9. Weeping Roses