Flesh & The Dream

Flesh & The Dream

Choose Mortality

Everything Forever

As Flesh & The Dream, Heather Leigh & Shackleton chart an ambitious journey of discovery in the psychic dancehall, conjuring a debut album that’s a psychedelic prog masterpiece, probing the gooey membrane between outré folk vocalisations and dizzying, queered soundscapes. There's nowt out there quite like it, channeling the spirits of Annette Peacock, Anna Homler, Coil, Kate Bush, Rrose, Harry Partch and Yes into a brilliantly unfathomable, singular vision. ‘Choose Mortality’ cultivates a delirious blossoming of ideas seeded when the pair first collaborated in 2019 for the Tunes of Negation 'Reach the Endless Sea' album. Bonding over a common musical language, but also a shared fascination with philosophy, religion and literature, they started pooling musical sketches to funnel their mutual passions into mottled alloys of outsider folk, fourth world musick and unstable, experimental electronics. Distilled in spiralling dervishes and freely modal songcraft, their mutable artforms elide in fantastically slippery, lyersgic hallucinations of prog-pop guided by a rhythmic psychedelia. Heather Leigh shapeshifts in typically elusive form, wraithlike and seductive, as Shackleton’s signature, roiling percussive battery meets his muse with shearing synth textures and a rhinestone shimmer. They strikingly recall moments of Sleazy’s Threshold Houseboys Choir in the puckered tone of ‘Diviner Of The Flesh’, and ascend magisterial levels of heart-in-mouth psychedelics with biblical centrepiece ‘Book of Daniel Part 3 (The Image of God and the Blazing)’. If the prog excesses of Yes, Genesis and King Crimson were an attempt to mechanise or electrify...