Let It Wander Circles Around The Sun

• 1 On My Mind 07:52
• 2 One For Chuck 05:53
• 3 Immovable Object 09:33
• 4 Halicarnassus 19:18
• 5 Tacoma Narrows 08:01
• 6 Electric Chair (Don't Sit There) 07:41
• 7 Ticket To Helix NGC 7293 19:35
• Total Runtime 01:17:53

Info for Let It Wander

Circles Around The Sun explore new horizons on the band’s upcoming double album, LET IT WANDER. It’s the first new music from the quartet since their acclaimed 2015 debut, Interludes For The Dead.

Originally, Circles Around the Sun (CATS) was only supposed to record some Grateful Dead-influenced instrumentals to be played during the set breaks at the Dead’s “Fare Thee Well” concerts. But the response was so positive, and the band was having so much fun making music together, that they all agreed to keep it going.

LET IT WANDER signals a new beginning for the band as they move beyond their original musical mandate of evoking the spirit of the Dead and fully embrace their own personality. “More than anything, what you hear on this album is a band growing into its own sound,” Casal says.

The songs on LET IT WANDER are focused and filled with imaginative musical turns. Horne and Levy form a veritable groove machine that knows intuitively when to tighten up and when to stretch out. They expand and collapse the rhythmic pocket around Casal and MacDougall, who pass melodies back and forth in an elaborate game of musical tag as they take turns adding color and shade from a seemingly endless kaleidoscope of cosmic sounds.

One of the album’s highlights, “One For Chuck” features a surprising cameo by Chuck D. The charismatic leader of the legendary hip-hop pioneers Public Enemy happened to stop by the studio while the band was listening to a song they’d just recorded. He liked the music, so the band asked him to record an intro. He obliged, and they dedicated the song to him.

Neal Casal, guitar
Adam MacDougall, keyboards
Dan Horne, bass
Mark Levy, drums

Circles Around The Sun
Few albums have the creation myth of Interludes For The Dead by Neal Casal's Circles Around The Sun. The 10 instrumental jams that encompass the release were commissioned by Justin Kreutzmann, the filmmaker son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, to accompany the biographical visuals he was compiling to be shown during set break at the "Fare Thee Well" concerts the living members of the Dead played in the summer of 2015.

As guitarist in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and a sometime participant in Dead bassist Phil Lesh's Phil & Friends jam sessions, Casal was a natural for the project; he, in turn, brought on Brotherhood keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne and drummer Mark Levy. At the shows, their music was a smash sensation: deeply familiar to the reunited Deadheads in how it tonally, rhythmically and melodically mimicked the Dead's songs, yet possessing its own weirdo majesty. Some pieces were explicit in their reverence, while others applied the Dead's freewheeling modus operandi and took their own course.

At more than 20 minutes, "Kasey's Bones" is most certainly one of the latter. From the opening electric-piano-plus-guitar squall/lurch, there's a Bitches Brew vibe to the proceedings. If most of the track's first 10 or so minutes clip along at a shuffling pace Deadheads will recognize (and haters will cite as primary evidence), the latter half is a unique explosion. It begins around the 10th minute, when MacDougall's switch to a spacey-sounding Juno synth serves as a prompt, and then they're off. MacDougall is on a clavinet creating stabbing funk patterns, while Casal weaves lines around him, the pair mimicking the early-'70s interplay between Jerry Garcia and his non-Dead keyboard partners, Merl Saunders and Howard Wales.

Soon, though, Casal hits a turbo-charge of pure lead-guitar shredding, and the rhythm section supports him with equally intense playing that crackles continually for three or four minutes with zero let-up. When it comes out the other side, everyone takes a breath: Levy keeps a steady pocket with Horne on dubby support, while MacDougall and Casal drift slowly toward an ambient space before devolving into an electronic-music black hole. If you know the Dead's trajectory, it's a perfect distillation of the group's fusion-filled 1973-74 jams. If you don't, it's a wonderfully evocative soundtrack for posterity, as it was for five thrilling summer nights.

This album contains no booklet.