Following last year’s The Right Hand Is Doomed to Blacken, Australian perennial drifter, Michael Plater, returns with another new project, The Taps of the Holy Trinity.
Also featuring Arthur Karanikas (electric guitar, tzoura, zurna, djembe), Dee Hannan (vocals, organs, lauto) and David Bullock (percussion), The Taps of the Holy Trinity will release their debut LP, Customs & Rituals of The Taps of the Holy Trinity on June 20 via Fenny Compton.
Exclusive to Sun 13, filmed at Hanging Rock in Victoria, you can watch the video for the band’s track, Most of Them Were Ghosts.
Also featuring appearances from Danny Martinov (drums), Massimiliano Gallo (violin) and Paul Rodgers (theremin), The Taps of the Holy Trinity are like a communal gathering that you witness from afar. The observational glass, separating you from the music, affording the relevant space to fully grasp what this project is about.
Plater and Karanikas’ Mediterranean heritage leak from these songs like sweat from the pores, such as the humidity in these compositions. While Plater’s The Right Hand Is Doomed to Blacken possessed its own locality having been recorded in Greece, The Taps of the Holy Trinity’s Melbourne roots offer their own scents and colours.
Beginning from the very first note of The Magus. Sweeping psychedelic drone that rings out from the speakers, Hannan’s wordless choruses reach beyond the paths forged by The Lord and Petra Haden earlier in the decade via the stunning Devotional.
On Most of Them Were Ghosts, The Taps of the Holy Trinity uncover a new layer of cryptic folk music. Leading their audience through the briars to the forest’s deepest parts, it’s here where the band finds peace in nature’s freedoms. Their music completely untethered from common realities.
Then there’s Buried Crown. The most stripped back of the bunch, it could have been on Plater’s excellent 2023 LP, Ghost Music. And speaking of ghosts, Anastenaria sounds like a transmission from another world. Dovetailing with the aptly titled Slow Ghosts, both songs stir up the spirits who roam freely among the living.
The two songs roll seamlessly into the final song, The Passage. Again, a worthy song title, as all 12-plus minutes of it encompasses The Taps of the Holy Trinity experience. An earthy mediation that cleanses the mind where spiritual majesty eclipses the malaise that this world has become. It’s what psychedelia is all about. No superficialities or exhibitionism, but purely ritualistic. This band, unafraid to submit to greater forces.
That’s what The Taps of the Holy Trinity accomplish on Customs & Rituals of The Taps of the Holy Trinity. It’s a celebration of community. Carrying a legacy both now and into the future, which is where the band is heading. And those willing enough should follow them there.
Customs & Rituals of The Taps of the Holy Trinity is out June 20 via Fenny Compton. Pre-order from Bandcamp.
