It’s a few years now since Uncut magazine’s Ambient Americana: A Road Trip Across Psychic America compilation, and the tendency still appears to obtain uncertain purchase on this side of the Atlantic. Excluding such pioneer outriders as the late Michael Chapman, and assorted rogue Fahey-influenced instrumentalists, its major UK boosters are now demonstrably Bobby Lee and Joe Harvey-Whyte.

The Sheffield-based guitarist Lee has been making incisive incursions for some years, notably with Endless Skyways for Tompkins Square in 2023, and during the interminable lockdown winter of 2021 with Origin Myths whose emphatic kosmiche-sprinkled ‘Impregnated By Drops Of Rainbow’ would later achieve live iteration enhanced by Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel. An astute commentator on the twisted roots of the choogle, and an assiduous curator and compiler, he holds a near-unmatched familiarity with the byways and backwaters of Cosmic American music.

Harvey-Whyte is best-known as a former member of The Hanging Stars though also a much-in-demand session player, touring musician, and regular Soho Radio DJ maintaining a particular interest in field recording and ambient works. His intriguing two-track 12” Flatland/Spaceland grew out of extended lockdown sessions improvising to the live video feed from the International Space Station.

Crossing paths originally when Lee augmented Gospelbeach on a tour with The Hanging Stars the pair would eventually play a series of shows together, in company with Jeffrey Silverstein, as the Cosmic Country Revue, and out of that surfaced a live album and then Last Ride. Marshalling an impressive arsenal across the album; pedal steel, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drum machine, harmonium, field recordings, Fender bass, Fender Rhodes, synth, harmonica, wooden flute, are all somewhere in the mix; they deliver a sequence of predominantly instrumental drifts dwelling in a mythic, mystic, alternative south-western United States with the pieces snaking out from their evocative titles into unique trance-inducing explorations.

The album’s mood was set by opener and first single, ‘Flatbed Alfalfa Run To Pueblo, Colorado, Fall 1972’; the title alone, along with the accompanying image of two vintage longhairs on a desert road with a Ford Pick-Up, hurtles you back to a world of Two Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, and Dripping Springs Reunion. Its notable lope and relentless beat maintain a groove with which the morphing guitars make common cause; it runs a matter of minutes but it could easily extend to eternity.

‘Sagebrush Fire’ contrastingly seems all mood, imbued with lonesome spirituality and hinting of a regret echoed in the sampled voice stating: ‘its chief value is not its beauty but its wildness… try and keep it wild’. Another voice, that of Swimming Bell, accompanies the desultory rhythms of ‘Smoke Signals’ though here it’s somewhat masked, deep in the fug with fragments of dub, synth, and the ghost of Papa John Creach (It blossoms in a longer B.J.Smith remix bringing the vocals upfront and reclaiming the tune as a forgotten Laurel Canyon anthem from an alternate universe).

A guitar gifted to Joe by Iain Matthews is employed on ‘Plainsong’ and the gesture likely provides the name. Its deliberate picking emerges from an opening harmonium drone and slivers of English traditional seem immanent. While the meditative ‘Deep Time’ reaches back to earth’s beginnings ‘The Babalon Working’ only sees us to late 1940s California and the antics of rocket scientist/occult practitioner Jack Parsons and sidekick L. Ron Hubbard reimagined in an easy-listening, lounge, surf and spaghetti melange. ‘Grass Covered The Ground’ and ‘Into The Circle’ follow, in their turns primordial and pastoral.

Then one final turn to an imagined Pacific wherein ‘Digital Cetaceans’ manifest, and a tugboat’s siren turns into the voices of the denizens of the deep. Lastly on to ‘The Island of California’; a cartographical misapprehension engendering a gentle float through a cancelled landscape and a progress of haunted spirits retreating towards and across the waters until only echoes remain vibrating fainter and fainter, and this memorable Last Ride meets its silent terminus.

Available now from Curation Records