What's in a name? In the case of mysterious Seattle voyagers Master Musicians Of Bukkake, more than might meet the eye, given the frankly hair-raising sexual practice they've pilfered it from. By subverting any potential seriousness with a playful (if slightly graphic) pun, the group's moniker, a riff on Moroccan maestros Master Musicians Of Jajouka, neatly encapsulates the contradictions that drive the band and their music. On the one hand they're as straight-faced as it's possible to be for a band of their psychedelic ilk, unashamedly labyrinthine of composition, global in their absorption of influences and with a fondness for sprawling track titles that subtly reference Western excesses and Eastern mysticism. On the other hand – and just as crucial to their identity – they're arch tricksters in the vein of contemporaries.
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The group recently completed and released the final album in their Totem Trilogy, a series that started in 2009 with its heaviest instalment and moved seamlessly into the the drone-led meditational spaces of last year's second volume. Totem 3 is the series' most accessible, lighter on heavy-lidded distortion and paying audible homage to the scorched desert blues of North Africa in addition to their usual cyclic, raga-like guitar figures. It remains a hypnotic listen, if a little friendlier for casual listening, but closes with perhaps the series' most intense moment of all: the horrifying synth-psych of 'Failed Future', which gradually drags a snakelike guitar line beneath a sea of John Carpenter-esque frazzled electronics. It's a particularly unsettling way to end, closing the series on a note that's more question than resolution...