In my eyes, Pond’s music is the epitome of psychedelic music.

Their extended jams with no definite structures, just sections of constant, numbing beauty, certainly feel enveloping and smooth, still and calm as the surface of a pond. On closer inspection, though, one quickly notices all the creatures swarming underneath, all the constituents of the brew, in the same way that what you perceive as a single object might turn out to be several objects as you hone in on it.

What makes Pond’s psychedelic music work so well is that its elements are perpetually changing, although often ever so slightly. By subtly varying the patterns, the songs constantly crosses the line between the snuggly familiar and the exciting unfamiliar, a delightful balancing act that makes the listener return again and again.

In the latest track they’ve released, entitled “Sitting Up On Our Crane”, I find the extended jam starting at around 3:35 truly engrossing; repetitive, yet infinitely animated and alive. If motion is characteristic of life, then Pond have found the key to depicting it using variations subtle enough not to perturb the flow, yet apparent enough for it to feel refreshing. This gentle motion, maybe reminiscent of some techniques used in ambient music (“ambient” etymologically meaning “going around”, thus also implying a sense of motion), is apparent on several levels. First, instruments furtively step in and out of the soundscape, with the spotlight endlessly changing from one instrument to the next. For instance, after several listens, I’ve yet to pick up the exact moment the synth or guitar becomes audible at the beginning of the section. On top of that, the instruments constantly move around in the stereo space, thus also stripping the performance of any sense of reality. The panning is modulated cleverly and has a very human feel to it, which might explain why we subconsciously connect more to the song: as soon as we recognize it’s not automated, that there’s some sort of human fallibility to it, an apparent randomness but not artificial, we become more receptive to whatever the message is, what the composer was trying to convey, in the same way that your round-of-the-mill text-to-speech voice feels incredibly duller than that of a proper human, with the variations in tones and the rest.

To come back to the subject of subtle motion, the sound of the bass and pretty much every other instrument also seems to be filtered in a way that constantly changes their timbres, the bass getting alternatively boomier or thinner, pressing in or out, massaging the brain. Even the vocal “moans” – or however you would like to call them – vary in volume and sometimes start with a delay, or even change pitch for the very last one.

On more attentive listening, we might pick up on the plucked guitar strings at the beginning of the section, and discover some more of the ingredients that contributed to the effect that track originally had on us.

Although it might be more noticeable in other songs by Pond, there is also a decided loose feel to the tracks, with the slow drumming, casual slip-ups and notes landing not quite on the beat.

I encourage you to listen to the song at a sufficient volume here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txTkY05K_f8. The section starting at 3:35, which I’ve been writing about, I have had a fixation on today, and although I usually don’t listen to parts of tracks separately, I misbehaved and must have played that section a good eight times this afternoon.

You might be interested in my review of Pond frontman Nicholas Allbrook’s song “Tramadol With Fear”, just as brilliant and psychedelic; or in my very spacey journey to one of Pond’s concerts, full of twists and turns.