Summer may be over, but the dream of open roads and endless skies still lingers. Church of Hed’s Under Blue Ridge Skies offers a sonic road trip through the Appalachian highlands—where synths, motorik rhythms, and scenic wonder converge into a journey worth taking.
Fuzzy prog and kraut adjacent synth workouts
Summer is over, but we can still dream of an endless one, or of next year, and the road trips we’d like to go on, of the places we’d like to see, of the distances we’d like to cover by the power of motorized wheels. The soundtrack will be important too. Here it consists of motorik beats and Moog heavy synthesis. This record from Columbus, Ohio’s Church of Hed is like an Appalachian autobahn. Instead of grooving at highspeed in Germany, it grooves with much velocity across the ever curving lanes of the Blue Ridge Parkway, taking listeners on skyline trip up to where trees reach for the stars.
This is the third volume in the Rivers of Asphalt series from Church of Hed, all aural travelogues along classic American roads. The first album, Rivers of Asphalt, takes Route 66 as its inspiration, while The Father Road is a journey across the Lincoln Highway. The Blue Ridge Parkway connects two National Parks, the Great Smoky Mountains, on the North Carolina side, over 469 miles to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.
I love roads. Trails. Paths through the wilderness. Animal traces. Here in America many of our roads and highways started off as animal traces, then became Native American trails, and then made into roads as we know them today. I hope something of their original character remains, and it intrigues me to think of these roads being walked on and driven on by animals and humans in different times and places. All of us leaving our trace.
This album is the sonic journal of one such trace, and it sallies forth over the gurgling streams and brooks of fuzzy prog and kraut adjacent synth workouts. It’s muscular music, building, swelling, climbing up the altitudes, but not without stretches of drone to see the cloud covered vistas and valleys below, before tripping back out into the surreal sensations of oscillating sequencers.
There are many gems hidden enroute ::
The Blue Ridge Parkway got its start in 1935 as a Civilian Conservation Corp project, when the country needed to find something to do with its down and out hungry masses. The parkway was conceived as a road into nature, allowing access to hiking trails, parks, scenic overlooks and places to pull off and have a picnic. The job wasn’t completed until fifty-two years later. There are many gems hidden enroute, just as there are in these pieces of music.
There is a sense of bliss and transcendence in these forward moving atmospheric anthems. Once you get settled in and turn it on, there is no turning back. There might be dangers ahead, but these don’t bother me so much as the feeling of adventure, the electric wind coming through the windows, the feeling of ecstasy at travel conveyed through stimulating rhythms and effects.
“Abbot’s Fantasia” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. Dense textures, twittering LFO knobs, chirping melodies that cascade like water in the nearby streams, synth washes and chords all combine to make a pleasant fantasy forest atmosphere. “Our Grandfather the Mountain” is the least tuneful, but more textural and ambient of the pieces with its blooming noises and gently pinging resonance traps creating a ladder on which to ascend to the brilliant summit above. The closer of the album is “A Carolina Elegy,” where the synthesized winds create a peaceful moment of reflection accentuated by graceful synth melodies in counterpoint. The textures of melancholy build and swell as the end of the road comes into site, and the trip back home begins.
I hope to travel on future asphalt roads with Church of Hed, as this journey has been a memorable one.
Under Blue Ridge Skies is available on Eternity’s Jest. [Bandcamp]
