Byron Metcalf & Rob Thomas: Medicine Work (CD)

Award-winning shamanic-trance drummer Byron Metcalf and master didgeridoo artist Rob Thomas of Inlakesh combine their musical and personal medicines to create an extremely potent sonic brew. Medicine Work is a psychoactive offering – synergistically forged in the timeless hearth of shamanic intent and ceremony and is designed to guide and support intrepid travelers into deeper territories of their inner worlds – far beyond the known and familiar.

Medicine Work could have been created a thousand years ago, hidden from the world and used only for the highest degree of altering consciousness with instruments that have remained unchanged over the Eons; hand drums, rattles and didgeridoo. Thankfully for us, trance percussion alchemist Byron Metcalf and didgeridoo maven Rob Thomas (“Inlakesh”) are not hidden away in another era doing their medicine work for a forgotten tribe obscured by time. This recording puts the listener directly ‘inside’ the experience through high resolution recording skills and searing performances aimed at one thing: blowing away all the residue of the day-to-day with these ancient tools, presented in almost 3D clarity and preservation of tone. Rob’s didgeridoo is presented in such detail that it feels cellular and the interlocking patterns of Byron’s percussion work invoke an involuntary trance state that just simply feels as if you never want it to stop – and it will not once you hit play. – Steve Roach