Ever immune to the vagaries of mainstream music, Ozric Tentacles’ Through The Magick Valley is the third in a series of comprehensive box sets recounting the progress of Ed Wynne’s wildly prolific psychedelic crew.
Spanning the years 2002 to 2015, this 10-disc extravaganza celebrates their gentle disdain for conformity with an absurd amount of cross-pollinated acid rock indulgence.
Like its predecessors, Travelling The Great Circle and Trees Of Eternity, Magick Valley has little to pin itself to any particular era. Instead, its kaleidoscopic contents exist proudly out of time, a testament to the stoned eccentricity that has fuelled them since their formative days as figureheads for the free festival scene.
It may lack big-hitting, chart-adjacent works like Jurassic Shift and Arborescence, but this set is still bulging with red-eyed, bright ideas, displaying the same liberated ethos that first endeared them to space cadets nearly 20 years earlier.
Spirals In Hyperspace and The Floor’s Too Far Away are a last, gentle gasp for the classic Ozrics sound, with spiralling solos, dubbed-out grooves and blissful electronics.
he Yumyum Tree and Paper Monkeys (both remastered) hinge on the same genre-juggling amalgam, but with an emphasis on evolving technologies and fewer long-winded jams.
Both are fascinating – but they’re overshadowed by the colossal, double- album daring of Technicians Of The Sacred, which ushered in a new, rejuvenated era for the amorphous outfit. Zingy, exploratory tunes such as Switchback and Zenlike Creature tantalisingly pre-empt the latter-day career peak of 2023’s Lotus Unfolding in the process.
Meanwhile, two exemplary live recordings, Live At The Pongmasters Ball and Sunrise Festival, hammer home the band’s extraordinary collective prowess. A live DVD and an 84-page hardback book seal the deal.
Through The Magick Valley (2002-2015) is on sale now via Kscope.
