If you’ve ever heard (or even heard of) the Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, there’s a strong chance you’ve listened to Four Tet. Nearly two decades ago, the British producer was rifling through stacks of records in a London flea market, digging for samples among the castaways. He happened upon The Neptune Collection, an unknown-to-him 1976 release from the Folkways label. With the record’s enormous green-and-purple vortex at the center, the quizzical band name on the flanks, and Folkways’ proud pedigree in tow, Four Tet took a chance.
The album’s first cut, “Neptune Rising,” immediately rewarded his risk. In fact, its second little guitar riff—so high-pitched and plaintive it sounds like a harp being played with a bottleneck slide—became the coruscating core of “She Moves She,” the undeniable anthem of Four Tet’s 2003 LP, Rounds. Entourage had called it quits twenty years earlier, but a former collaborator heard the track during a student’s dance performance, recognized the indelible hook, and alerted guitarist Wall Matthews, one of Entourage’s surviving members. He met Four Tet, accepted (with some snark) his explanation as to why he hadn’t cleared the sample, and welcomed the trickle of cash and cachet that came. It was Entourage’s posthumous, largely nameless flirtation with very minor fame.
But now, Entourage has another potential avenue out of obscurity. Since 2005, Tompkins Square Records has revived the reputations of at least a dozen overlooked guitar pickers and folk singers, excavating essential listens from the private-press graveyard. For the three-disc set Ceremony of Dreams, the label and Matthews waded through much of what Entourage recorded but didn’t release on its two captivating Folkways albums. The result is a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance. Ceremony of Dreams confirms what Four Tet’s sample from so long ago suggested: Entourage really does sound that cool.
It’s important to note that Entourage was not a New York or Los Angeles band. Instead, they thrived in relative cultural isolation—first in the recesses of a Baltimore disco, then in a string of small college towns and coastal cities through New England. A bit of a performance art collective, they often accompanied dance and theatrical productions or were joined onstage by dancers. On and off in different incarnations between 1970 and 1983, Entourage paralleled or presaged several vital artistic movements with a stunning sense of clarity and resolve. These 30 tracks alternately conjure the ecstatic minimalism of John Cale and La Monte Young, the billowing clouds of Arvo Pärt, the aleatory intrigue of Derek Bailey, and the strange guitar beauty of Sandy Bull. Entourage weaves the melodies of Iraq, the moodiness of country & western, and the open-ended quests of what would become “jam bands” into all of these strains.
Forty years later, it still feels genuinely adventurous. Ceremony of Dreams is a strange box set—fitting, you know, given the eccentricity and oddity of its subject. Neither of Entourage’s two LPs, which can be downloaded and nabbed on CD through Folkways or bought for outlandish collector prices online, are included. If you want to hear the version of “Neptune Rising” that Four Tet sliced, it’s not here. Instead, you find two different interpretations—an early version where the bit Four Tet bought is less prominent and an alternate take where everything feels muted and smoothed, as if the song is somehow being transmitted through a dream.
Most of these 30 tracks are outtakes, alternate takes, or partial demos of tunes later completed by the full band. There are three consecutive versions of “The Shores of God,” a slippery saxophone-and-piano fantasy that brilliantly balances at the edges of soft jazz and new age psychedelia and showcases the finesse of Entourage founder Joe Clark. With warped electric bass and endless piano glissandi, the finished version, unreleased until now, feels like Weather Report conjuring and chiding Debussy. A rendition for horns and bowed bass reveals the magisterial harmonies and bold vibrato at play, while a piano-only take shows the Keith Jarrett-like impulses lingering beneath it all. More than the crowded and frantic version that ends The Neptune Collection, this take on “Tarbox Poltergeist” shows that Matthews was one of the most dashing acoustic soloists of his day, worthy of mention even now alongside the likes of Bert Jansch. A fragment of the glorious “Euphoric Bells” seems not simply to hang in the air but to become the air itself, suggesting it has and will forever exist. Because so little is known about Entourage at all, this composite of odds and ends feels revelatory from start to finish—an addendum that becomes the core by virtue of its very existence.
The songs on Ceremony of Dreams may make you ponder the history of cultural appropriation and its role in Entourage’s music. Written by a motley crew of college professors and white bohemians, these songs undeniably lift from Iraq’s maqam tradition and India’s ragas, from the barebones blues and brassy bebop. But they feel like composites of enthusiasms, made not with a mind for exploitation so much as exploration. These songs are uniformly uncanny and singular, suggesting that Entourage’s biggest worry was always trying to build something new from parts it already loved. It’s only appropriate then that most of us only stumbled upon Entourage when a young electronic magpie did the same with pieces from one of its songs, simply because he loved the sound. At last, Ceremony of Dreams gives us the bigger picture.
