Album Review: David Shea - Rituals

Rituals is David Shea’s first foray out of the aural wilderness for close to a decade, and it’s hauntingly mesmerising.

Shea’s affinity with the Australian environment pervades these seven tracks, including Ritual 32 which feels like an industrial counterpoint to Picnic At Hanging Rock; collaborations with likeminded noise wanderers Lawrence English and Oren Ambarchi; the double-helix netherworld of field recordings that is Wandering In The Dandenongs. The superb closer Green Dragon Inn inexorably zones in and out of cultural boundaries, thus creating a hypnotic plateau where ritual becomes an omniscient, all-pervading constant.