Reviews

Hands of Hydra / Janina Angel Bath DUO ~ Stargazer ~ Limited Edition Cassette ~ Sold Out 

“Hands of Hydra is Adam Krakow, who is also a member of Plastic Crimewave Sound. Adam’s command of the sitar is conspicuously heard throughout Stargazer, a 30 minute meditation that combines his adept, devoted playing with the sweet, gentle, awe-inspiring voice and tamboura playing of Janina Angel Bath. Janina Angel is worthy of high praise. The Sloow description referred to her voice as, “celestial nectar dripping from astral spheres ready to awake the inner kundalini serpent from its slumber.” – the most accurate description I can imagine. Her angelic voice radiates sunlight, nourishing areas which have been blighted by neglect. An extremely talented woman, this precocious multi-instrumentalist and vocalist has studied North Indian Classical Vocal Music with Sri Karunamayee, Joan Allekotte, Michael Stirling and Terry Riley – all are disciples/students of Pandit Pran Nath of the Kirana Gharana. Also, she appeared on the psyched, baked out grooves of Eternal Tapestry’s 2008 NNF opus, Mystic Induction. Her latest release is Gypsy Woman.  As the sitar strings reverberate, Janina Angel’s majestic voice illuminates the room with spiritual smoke – a haze that engulfs all who travel through. She is a goddess and her voice resonates with fidelity. Illnesses and pain can dissipate in the face of such illuminating beauty. The shift in tone of her voice and the reverberations of the sitar represents legs of a ladder, climbing higher until we have fused with the august sun. Her vocals have a unique depth that echo in the mind.  As Blake once wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. Janina Angel’s voice provides a refuge to the horrific realities of life in this world. Her voice is like a magic carpet, allowing one to perceive life from above, promoting peace and lucidity. I trust in her voice… see you on the other side.”

-Honest Bag

Gypsy Woman ~ CD 2009 / Limited edition LP 2010 :

“With past releases including Acid Mothers Temple and Yahowha 13, we can always count on Prophase to deliver a lysergic dose of psychedelic awesomeness.  Gypsy Woman is their latest offering of psych-folk bliss, a free flowing cosmic epic from Oakland’s tarot warrior Janina Angel Bath.  With the help of some friends and a wide array of world instruments, including bansuri, tamboura and flute, Ms. Bath gently crafts an otherworldly escape into ethno-drone solace.  While Gypsy Woman is heavily decorated with exotic instrumentation and dizzying effects, the majority of the album revolves around Ms. Bath’s vocal work.  Mystic Lady, a favorite track of ours, probably because it features Kazem Zia Ebrahimi on electric sarod, unfolds like a hazy desert dreamscape. Somber gestures from the sarod weave in and out of Bath’s vocal croons.  Swells of reverb fade into the distant horizon as the many layers fall into place like a leaf onto water, so mysterious and elegant.”

-Aquarius Records

“…Housed in a magnificent gatefold sleeve, Gypsy Woman is a timeless and meditational album from Janina Angel Bath, whose voice is layered like silk over eastern percussion and slow motion droning strings.  Slow and mindful, it takes a while for your brain to settle into the album’s delicious groove, but once the magic of Everyday is Different takes hold, there is nothing left to do but relax and dream, allowing the minimal and haunting psychedelia take you away.  Moving on to the title track, the addition of a faraway flute adds another layer of beauty to the music, the mystical, quest-driven lyrics perfectly in sync with the drifting ambience of the arrangement.  Opening side two, Mystic Lady has echoes of Quintessence, or classic Gong, deep rooted eastern psych, with some rippling guitar twinkling throughout.  This ambience continues for the rest of the side, sitars coming to the fore, creating music for late night visualisation, the flicker of a candle the only light you need.  Included in the album is a bonus 10″ disc that contains six more songs, all wreathed in the same perfumed bliss, each as perfect as the previous song, including the lovely flute and drum happiness of Roaming Song, whilst Life Everlasting Flowers is a light and airy drone that sings of summer.  Highly recommended.

-Terrascope UK

“Keying off Indian traditional music, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Janina Angel Bath creates contemplative soundscapes on Gypsy Woman, sometimes singing impressionistic lyrics over extended melodies in the disembodied manner of Bjork or wailing moodily like a becalmed Yoko Ono.  Bath handles most of the instruments herself, among guitars, keyboards, flutes, percussion and tambura and bansuri.  Joss Jaffe’s tabla adds a particularly Indian flavor to the early track Everyday is Different, but Indian music is the basis of much of the sound, particularly the drone effects characteristic of it.  Although Bath sings in English, she adopts the phrasing and cadences of Eastern music, so that her voice becomes an instrument even when it is intoning recognizable words.  The music may be useful in meditation for Westerners, representing as it does a hybrid style in which East meets West.”

-All Music Guide

“Janina Angel Bath is a faun-like entity from Oakland, California, who’s immersed in ancient belief systems and a cosmic consciousness that’s rarely been appropriated since the heady days of the early ’70s.  Her debut album, Gypsy Woman, conjures up elemental forces of nature–and it’s not surprising it was released on the same label as Yahowha 13 and Acid Mothers Temple.  What at first may seem demanding due to lack of structure very soon takes shape as Bath’s deep, healing voice and free music (played on an array of traditional instruments, both Eastern and Western), wash over the listener, disconnecting them from the modern world via meditative drones and free-flowing primal melodies.  At times Gilli Smyth springs to mind, as does Robin Williamson, while there are traces of Linda Perhacs, but Janina is very much her own woman, perhaps more connected to Native America than anything else.  Music before time.”

-Record Collector Magazine

“If you give your songs titles like Ephemeral Exaltation and Life Everlasting Flowers, you’re either a a true-blooded psychedelic folk hippie or a spot on satirist.  It’s initially hard to tell with Janina Angel Bath and her album Gypsy Woman; it so effectively evokes 1972 that it seems like a lost private press album from that time.  She leans toward free form, cosmically abstract pieces that are pleasingly unvarnished.  Full marks for the packaging, too – gatefold sleeve, coloured vinyl and a hidden 10″ record!”

-Shindig! Magazine

“Taking the folk genre by the scruff of the neck, Janina opens her musical direction to world influence.  She’s a multi-instrumentalist, playing everything from the tamboura, bansuri and Native American flute to the Farfisa, bowed guitar and your basic piano.  There’s no actual ‘world music’ going on here though.  This is folk music with exotica draped upon it.  As you can see if you check out her website, Janina has a ‘back to the earth’ manner about her production and how she implements her music.  There’s a sparseness in her arrangements that appear to be derived partly from Asiatic, possibly Indian and Buddhist cultures with her voice lying, untreated and naked, over the top of these cleanly recorded instruments.  There’s an almost supernatural aspect to her productions, however.  She sings, they play but there’s an unspoken third element that lifts the pieces higher.  However, as the LP progresses, the music then almost transforms itself.  It remains sparse and weed-free but Janina moves towards the mountain mystery of deepest American swamp blues which produces its own myths and black magic.  The tone becomes a little more threatening, too – from its wholly honest and pure beginnings.  There is one additional, unusual aspect to the Janina vocal, and its how she phrases her words and integrates her lyrics into the song.  It’s almost as if her voice becomes part of the overall instrumentation as her delivery moves in rhythm to the backing noises, moving in tone and speed to become one with the arrangement.  This is an unusual album but one that, for those that enjoy a more left field experience, will be a fulfilling journey.”

-HI-FI World UK