Lumerians – Transmalinnia

The sound quality is great on this pressing. Awesome album !

What the Lumerians do best is to create hypnotic psychedelic trancelike music that’s been deeply influenced by what went down the the late 60’s and early 1970’s and move it into the future … what they are not best at, is being consistent.

The band falls into that odd region where for some reason artists feel that modern day psych and space rock needs to be confusing and perplexing, designing their songs with textures, fuzzed out chord changes and cosmic voodoo rhythms that have been inspired by the transcendental attitudes of poet and artist Eugene Von Bruenchenchein, where as they describe it “Sonics become visions and visions become sonics, all all designed to trigger switches in your brain to function in communal context to the music.”

I found these mostly instrumental tracks to be rather confusing and disjointed, never finding the smooth currents that would allow me to drift, though out of all of the Lumerians’ releases, Transmmalinnia is the one that resonates most kindly with me. Even so, from this and their other outings I’ve only managed to keep but twenty-five minutes of material: “Orgon Girnder,” “Burning Mirrors,” “Black Tusk,” “Atlanta Brook” and “Atlantic,” leaving all the other tracks to find a place somewhere else to live, as I dislike my couch bound excursions to be disrupted by any jagged edges or redundant repetitions.

For some reason I’m unable to take the full journey charted and laid out by the Lumerians, as many of the destinations and stops along the way are places I find rather uninteresting, offering me nothing that I care to remember as they build layer on top of layer, allowing the songs to meander in far too many directions at the same time, where they appear to be expansively attempting to cover too much ground at once, and are in no hurry to be anywhere at all.

I’ll keep what warms my soul and shrouds my vision the best, with those songs being nothing less than ingenious, original and mind expanding.

*** The Fun Facts: The band draws their name from the sunken lost land of Lemuria, supposedly located somewhere in the Indian or the Pacific Ocean, much like Atlanta, yet more mysterious and visionary.

‘Transmalinnia’ is part of a series of painting by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein entitled ‘Voyage into Space.

As to their other albums Transmissions from Telos Vol. 4 and Vol. 3, ‘teleos’ is a philosophy of obtaining the ultimate object, the ultimate end, or the aim of reason.

Review by Jenell Kesler