A few things have changed for Adam Forkner since his last White Rainbow album from 2007, Prism of Eternal Now. A national tour with fellow kranky heads Valet and Atlas Sound, and countless hours jamming with Portland avant-music collective Rob Walmart inspired him to hunker down and dig deeper into his personal vision of what head music can be. The success of Prism finally catapulted Forkner's White Rainbow project from the deep semi-obscure trenches of the west coast psychedelic/noise underground into the fickle arms of a slightly wider audience. In a perhaps misguided reaction to the ever-widening trend of musicians trading in a pound of adventurousness for an ounce of 'accessibility,' Forkner has turned White Rainbow into an even more spontaneous and open-ended musical project and has shaped this new album into a dense, lengthy exploration of the relationship between hypnotic, circular, fourth-world drum rhythms, acid-boogie guitar, and drifting sheets of fuzzy psychedelic drone. The tracks on New Clouds are a tug-of-war between stasis and change, the desire to meld the meditative effects of a near static drone with the uplifting trip of free-flowing compositions. Slowly melting fluorescent sunsets morph into drapes of psychedelic fog, rumbling over cacophonous rhythms.
