Dot Allison – ‘Weeping Roses’ from ‘Consciousology’

‘Consciousology’ continues Dot Allison’s journey into the mystical space where music meets the natural realm in a symbiotic relationship. Opening track ‘Shyness of Crowns’ has the shimmer of Cocteau Twins heard through a pebblebed heat haze; a Spring afternoon lying in the bluebells of Blackbury Camp gazing skyward and marvelling at the space given by the trees’ upper reaches to each of their partners’ (a phenomenon that gives the track it’s title). ’Unchanged’ ups the pace and in hindsight might be the odd one out on the record as it drives along with an electricity that prickles the skin. Not to say it’s upbeat exactly. Rather it throbs, pulsates with earthy magic and a peculiarly soft strength. ‘Bleached by The Sun’ and ‘Moon Flowers’ work beautifully as a pair. The songs are brittle, tender, like Bridget St John in a Francesca Woodman photograph or Anne Briggs and Vashti Bunyan clutching the midsummer moonrise under a cloak of violets. Strings throw morning mists across landscapes of gently plucked guitar. This is folk music glancing backwards over its shoulder whilst remembering tomorrow’s aches and aimless regrets that are no regrets at all.

‘220Hz’ is a bubbling punctuation mark in the record. To get back to those notions of conceptuality that thread through the album, 220Hz is apparently the frequency at which tree roots communicate through the earth. To me it sounds like Siren song echoing through the har. ‘Double Rainbow’ meanwhile is obfuscated psychedelia featuring “the electrical activity in a plant… translated into pitch variations”. It results in tremulous whispers in foreign languages heard through keyhole cracks and carried away on thermals. These are threads that weave through themselves on a loom of ancient oak, each picking up the ghosts impregnated in the grain. ‘Milk and Honey’, meanwhile sounds like Avalon glimpsed through a vaguely sceptical Scottish eye; deliciously appealing yet peculiarly alien and Other.

The album closes with the intimate ‘Weeping Roses’, a song inspired by a tape given to Allison by Andrew Weatherall in the ‘90s that included two songs by Tim Hardin. At that point Hardin was, if I recall correctly, one of the great unknowns. Certainly, someone forgotten and not yet brought back to the public’s attention. ‘Weeping Roses’ then is perhaps a hymn to the beauty of both Hardin’s songwriting and to the magical spirit of Weatherall, who inspired so many with his eternal enthusiasm both for music and art and, perhaps more critically, for sharing his passion without fear or favour. It is a song that one fears might disappear when one opens one’s eyes; that might yet dissolve into the star-speckled oblivion of the heavens.

Indeed, the whole of ‘Consciousology’ often sounds like it might barely be there; space more vital than the music that punctuates it. Space that breathes into sound, that gifts it with the opportunity to weave around us like the scents and the energies of the nature than envelops and invisibly penetrates us. It is a record that rewards multiple listenings with its delicate layers of meaning and depth of thought. Thirty years, it might suggest, is no time at all and yet all the time imaginable.

My full review is published by International Times here: https://internationaltimes.it/consciousology-by-dot-allison/