Prairiewolf :: Zone Poems
Photo: Photon Obscura
Like a million bees buzzing around the hive of some harmonious hellscape fed by the ritualistic reverberations of millions of more wings flapping in the atmospheric alchemy of the wind, Boulder County, Colorado-based electro-acoustic instrumental trio Prairiewolf return after the release of their 2024 sophomore album “Deep Time” with perhaps their most ambitious body of work yet, “Zone Poems.” With the constant flood of meaningless, pointless content via the staticky screens of our trepidatious times, Prairiewolf breaks through the never-ending nonsense by showing us what’s poetically possible through the gift and art of making experimental music. Having toured both the Midwest and the West Coast in 2025, from breweries in Boulder to Cloud Station in Crestone to Colorado’s San Luis Valley, to name a few, the group built a radical repertoire of metaphysical material that would stun the eager ears of both their peers and contemporaries as they effortlessly express the esoteric excitement within their “Centennial State” community. While the album isn’t entirely composed of live recordings across its half-dozen tracks, a few of those performances were carefully captured in HI-FI multi-track quality and later overdubbed, with edits and various other melodic markings on the material’s dynamic DNA via cassette culture. Remaining in the sonic shadows of transcendental textures and the spiritual sequences of their cosmic compositions, members Stefan Beck, Tyler Wilcox, and Jeremy Erwin connect on levels that sound off the spiritual sirens that can be heard from several states over as the sun and moon share the same tectonic template over the band’s harmonious headquarters. Similar to a Kraftwerk fever dream that simultaneously shatters against the biblical backdrop of some satanic scene in the middle of a fictional forest in the middle of the night, “Zone Poems”takes listeners both new and old through the cosmic cracks and cerebral crevasses of the band’s planetary populace by demonstrating their breathtaking, and sometimes harrowing, abilities to combine the absolute abstract with the cinematic calculations of their instrumental intelligence.
“Snapshots of a wheel in motion. You could say we “mixed it for the hallucinations”. Yours or ours, time will tell.”
Photo: Agatha June
Across the album’s six tracks of sonically spliced and diced derangement, Prairiewolf creatively captures the evaporating essence of their energy with songs that truly fractal and flower like some psychedelic plant growing near the esoteric equator where space and time pass each other like two strangers in moving vehicles. The album’s first single, “Burning Edges,” gives the cosmic climate a chance to breathe before tracks like “Everything Ascending,” “Modifications,” and its opener, “The St. Vrain Method,” take off into the never-ending natural world, leaving behind a silvery stream of spiritual smoke that can be seen from any POV on planet earth. Marking the band’s third release of acclaimed La Selva Beach, California-based label Centripetal Force, the same imprint that not only brought you the band’s first two albums, but titles from such groups as Joseph Allred, Elkhorn, Prana Crafter, and Holy Mountain Top Removers, to name a few, “Zone Poems” is a brief, but brave meditation on melody, and the mysteries of life that is set for release July 17th as the summer sun continues to burn bright above our heads.
