In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the  Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing  like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson river,  carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, fears. A sound composed  of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a  voice of incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and  flow.  

Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev’s ninth  album Born Horses spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches its soul but can never truly know the  answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike  anything they have created before?  

The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan  Donahue (the hamlet of Mt Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in  their veins and brains of their now-legendary tapping of musical cosmology, and  the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys), plus long term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith  (double bass) and Jim Burgess (trumpet). A place that feeds off the levitating  mood of their last album, 2019’s expansive tribute Bobbie Gentry's The Delta  Sweete Revisited, and the instrumental psych explorations under the names of  Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev’s Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritual  guidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, to  whom Born Horses is dedicated.  

The record began with skeletal chords and a surge of self-reflection, from where  we are vulnerable alive to the notions and motions of time and reality