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Drummer creates other musical worlds and an Other Life Morgan Doctor, from the gay/transgender band The Cliks, taps her global ambient groove Morgan Doctor
Other Life
(Aporia Records) by John Diliberto Morgan Doctor is one of those musicians who finds herself between worlds. The music on her new solo album, Other Life, is marked by imagery-laden journeys colored with Indian instruments and ambient designs. She's a world music percussionist who's just as likely to play tabla drums in a kirtan session with Durga Das as mount the stage with The Cliks, a Canadian power-punk band.

On Other Life, Doctor mixes eight layered and textured instrumentals with a quartet of heartrending vocal tracks. The first is "There Were Horses," a sensual haiku with Clara Engel singing forlornly over Doctor's cyclical hang drum rhythm. It sets the introspective mood of the album, which contemplates themes of mortality through an eastern prism. "Namsam Sunrise" even uses a monk chanting at a Buddhist funeral in Korea. But while Doctor practices Yogic philosophies, her music is more progressive than meditative. Odd time signatures and expansive arrangements make her compositions cinematic in scope. It's a reflective mood but with hard charging grooves on tracks like "Silver City" and "Rebel."

Benjy Wertheimer guests on tracks like "Come Smiling Back," playing the Indian violin called the esraj, bending out those melancholy, resonant-string drenched themes. Violin and cello are over-dubbed into soaring string choirs on "Silver City."
That leads into one of three songs with singer/lyricist Tamara Williamson. "Show Me How" is a study in epic passion, the simplest of love songs performed with heroic shoegazer moodiness. I put it right next to Heidi Berry's "Cradle."

The album winds down through more ethereal terrain, beginning with the eastern trance psychedelia of "A Moment to Go," through to the aforementioned "Namsan Sunrise" and contemplative album closer, "Better Person."

Morgan Doctor's Other Life is a CD of transcendent ecstacy and subversive melody and it's our Echoes CD of the Month for April.