Before I get to the psychfolk epic-in-miniature that is “A Cultivation of Reflective & Meditational Skills,” please allow me to share my love for this act’s chosen name: Die Geister Beschwören may not roll off of your tongue, but it sure rolls off of mine. And its English translation—“summon the spirits” or “the spirits conjured up” or some iteration thereof—warms my little soul. I am a man of science by trade and a yearner for spirituality by experience, an oft-terrified someone crushed by the vastness of the world, the universe, the whole of existence, who wants to believe in any number of things but demands proof and validation. Ghosts, spirits, spectres—these are the supernatural entities that remain in the spaces of my mind where desire meets imagination long after the demise of holy trinities, hobbits, and space operas.
The music of Die Geister Beschwören brings me back to those spaces and swells my imagination enough for it to rub shoulders with the boundaries of what I am able to trust or believe. “A Cultivation of Reflective & Meditational Skills” is so aptly named that I am convinced the artist may have composed the music to match the title and not the other way around. The Cultivation takes place primarily across the first two minutes of the track as guitars at first spy warily and then ease themselves into the nest of a synth drone sparsely decorated with the most minimal of bells. Once comfortable in their surroundings, the guitars ebb and flow, advance and recede, swell up and fall back—and from somewhere far off a lap steel or a singing saw or a wailing soul joins in and announces the arrival of a male choir wordlessly calling out exactly the tones that can bear one’s mind close enough to the edge of the veil to actually touch fingers with those beyond it, before all parties recede into the ether and leave you with a warm hopefulness that maybe next time an exchange might take place.