David Lynch, Pink Floyd, Shoegaze and Ambient Converge on The Unified Field by All India Radio
Even after a quarter of a century, the name All India Radio is still confusing. Because it’s not the national broadcasting network of India and has nothing to do with India. It’s just the name assumed by Australian musician Martin Kennedy to extoll a trippy, Americana-tinged brand of hypnotic ambient music. Although Kennedy did reinforce the conceit on their first album, with a cover shot of an Indian street, and track titles like “Hotel Madras” and “Bollywood Nights.” There was nothing Bollywood or Indian in the music other than the modal vamps.
Taking cues from Brian Eno, Harold Budd, the KLF, and Ry Cooder, along with less obvious sources like French mellotron-heavy progressive band, Pulsar, All India Radio has been creating an enveloping, distinctive and melodic brand of ambient music for all of this millennium. After taking a side trip shredding heavy metal space rock with a project called Observers, On The Unified Field, Kennedy returns to his core sound of spare, reverberant guitar melodies that leave galactic spaces between notes. Or perhaps desert spaces might be a more accurate metaphor since the cover of the album is derived from a spoken word edition record of Frank Herbert reading Dune. Science Fiction is always in the fabric of All India Radio.
The album is vaguely conceptual, centered around the Unified Field Theory. For those of you, like me, not into the quantum mechanics of it all, the Unified Field is a theoretical concept in physics that proposes a single, overarching field from which all fundamental and elementary particles emerge. It’s elliptically explained by film director David Lynch, who Kennedy samples on the track, “The Red Room.” (Get the Twin Peaks reference there?) It sounds more new age than cosmic, a paean to internal peace delivered by Lynch’s nasal intonations.
From there, the album launches into a sequence of relatively short tracks, sometimes tapping lysergic moods. “Wisteria,” a title drawn from an incomplete David Lynch project, is a plaintive, guitar-driven ride into the liquid sunset with a synth pad that sounds like a choir holding long sustained notes.
This album taps that Ambient Americana side that All India Radio had on the 2016 album, The Slow Light, but powered by those heavy, late Pink Floyd-style drums from Chris Brush. “Uplift” taps into that Pink Floyd groove as well, with a wide open ambient intro over glissando guitar and a slow paced guitar riff calling out from the void. Pink Floyd is something of the North Star for Kennedy.
“Crystallinity” reveals a bit of Explosions in the Sky influence in Kennedy’s guitar playing and compositions. He mixes a country, open-plains feel with gurgling space noises hovering at the periphery like you may be approaching Area 51. Across those sounds All India Radio distributes a syncopated 4/4 groove with with deep bass from Mark Wendt and ringing electric guitar arpeggios, that have you floating in a nocturnal desert
Since his heavy metal project, Observers, Martin has leaned back into the more contemplative and moody side of his influences, channeling shoegaze into ambient meditations. He wrenches emotion on “Drifting,” playing the same riff while increasing the tremolo.
Other than some Indian field recordings that appeared on his early albums, Indian music has never been a notable signature in All India Radio. But the title track of this album does have an Indian vibe with a tamboura in the far distance creating a modal under-pinning, until one of those up-stroked guitar chords that Kennedy favors leads into an arpeggio-draped vamp, and a chordal guitar solo against a siren synth.
“Everything That Exists Anywhere,” a title that kind of summarizes the Unified Field Theory of physics, has a slow steady build to the most crushing guitar assault on the album, redolent of Explosions in the Sky’s crescendo designs, but not as heavy, befitting the more reflective mood of this album.
Ambience is something of a fourth musician in this essentially guitar-bass-drums alignment. Every track has slow motion churns of sound, some of it generated by guitar, some by synthesizers, but all of it lending performances a submersive feel. You can hear that to full effect on the final track, “Water of Life” is purely ambient. There are no drums or basslines, just floating ambiences and spare, four note guitar licks that are almost too distant from each other to be considered a melody.
A cover of Slowdive’s “Catch the Breeze” is the lone vocal track on this album. With the breathy, barely-there vocals of singer Lisa Gibbs, the Cocteau Twins/Mazzy Star influence is all over it like filigree and shadow.
The overarching mood of The Unified Field is contemplative. It’s not the astral trip of his album, Space, nor the ride through the high plains of The Slow Light, an Echoes CD of the Month in 2016 Instead, it sends you floating on spare melodic designs, guitars dripped in reverb and bent in tremolo, and rhythms that are one of the few anchors in this ambient space. Despite the David Lynch references, The Unified Field is more dreamy than menacing.
While there are nine distinct, individual tracks on the album, it almost feels like one piece, and I kind of wish he had composed them into each other, like Marconi Union created on The Fear of Never Landing and Bluetech did on Spacehop Chronicles 2. It’s the kind of journey you don’t want interrupted by silence because there is more than enough space in the music.
And if this isn’t enough for you, All India Radio has released, Transmissions from the Field, outtakes, sketches, demos and early versions from The Unified Field sessions.
Read our reviews of All India Radio’s Space, The Slow Light, Eternal, and The Generator of All Infinity