Future Times

As Plankton Wat, Dewey Mahood uses his considerable guitar prowess to deliver an album that encompasses both the wild, seeking energy of free-improvisation and the deliberate arrangements of more traditional composition. With his deft and stylistically varied playing, Plankton Wat’s Future Times escapes psychedelic tropes and chemical fueled alterations and instead celebrates an escape into the natural world. Future Times taps into psychedelia’s cou­nter-cultural heritage as music for protest, liberation and imagining new ways of being in this world. With his deft and stylistically varied playing Mahood escapes psychedelic tropes and chemical fueled alterations and instead celebrates an escape into the natural world. Future Times taps into psychedelia’s cou­nter-cultural heritage as music for protest, liberation and imagining new ways of being in this world.

From acclaimed albums with heavy-psych mainstays Eternal Tapestry to his prolific solo excursions, Mahood’s work has always been defined by his restless exploratory spirit and reverence for the environment. As Plankton Wat, Dewey Mahood creates expressionist compositions that exude a supernatural grace and patience, reflecting the resplendent beauty and mythical energy of the West Coast’s wild places. Piece blossoms from low-lit, porchside ambience into powerful head-trips, ushering the listener through ravines of feedback and along warm currents of synthesizer drift to peaks of lysergic bliss. Mahood’s masterful and distinct guitarwork consistently blurs the confines of the instrument, at once texturally and melodically rich. Future Times elevates Mahood’s psyche­delic instrumentals to new planes. Written to the backdrop of social unrest and climate change fueled fires, Mahood lays out a sprawling cinematic and psychedelic survey of a planet in crisis that weaves a path of hope through the darkness.

Recorded in the spring of 2020, with most of the United States sheltering in place, Future Times began as a meditation on the times. With the optimism of spring and the promise of summer replaced by anxiety about the future, music became an important means of processing difficult emotions and connecting with the outside world. Mahood developed pieces created with musical partner Dustin Dybvig and engineer/producer Victor Nash, transmuting the expansive energy of the live improvisations into lean guitar, bass and keyboards compositions.