Mythic Sunship

Danish psych-rockers Mythic Sunship look to the cosmic journeying of the 1970s Krautrock and free jazz scenes as well as the volume of early proto-metal for a sound that hedges toward the heavier side of exploratory instrumental rock. The band created sounds that were dark and druggy, tending toward long-form jams that melted guitar riffs into a stew of echoes, eventually branching out to include explosive saxophone in their swarms of feedback. The highly prolific group released new material regularly as their psychedelic sprawl took on new shapes with records like 2022's sixth studio album Light/Flux.

Mythic Sunship were formed in Copenhagen in 2010, choosing their name by mashing together the titles of two classic free jazz albums, <a href="spotify:artist:0tIODqvzGUoEaK26rK4pvX">Sun Ra</a>'s Of Mythic Worlds and <a href="spotify:artist:2hGh5VOeeqimQFxqXvfCUf">Coltrane</a>'s Sun Ship. Choosing a far more distorted reading on the astral traveling of those jazz greats, the band applied traditional hard rock instrumentation to loosely structured jams. Made up of bassist Rasmus Cleve Christensen, guitarists Emil Thorenfeldt and Kasper Stougaard Andersen, and drummer Frederik Denning, Mythic Sunship at times took on an almost punk level of crudeness in their approach to spiritually enlightened free music. Their first releases came in the form of limited cassettes and CD-Rs on various D.I.Y. labels.

They began a relationship with the <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22El+Paraiso%22">El Paraiso</a> label with the release of their first wide-scale album, Ouroboros, in 2016. That set was followed by Land Between Rivers not even a full year later, and 2018 saw the release of not one but two new records from Mythic Sunship, the spacy Upheaval and the more frenetic double-album Another Shape of Psychedelic Music. In 2020, the band released Changing Shapes, a live album that captured one of the three shows they'd performed at the 2019 Roadburn Festival. The live document served as a stopgap release as fans anticipated their next studio album. That record came in April 2021 with Wildfire, a particularly cacophonous chapter in Mythic Sunship's evolution. Wasting no time, sixth studio album Light/Flux (the title perhaps uncoincidentally similar to <a href="spotify:artist:1BGN1IdyiSR0ZYrkoKNchl">Tangerine Dream</a>'s 2017 outing Light Flux) was released in September of the next year, and continued the stormy, turbulent themes the band had been exploring from the beginning. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi