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Spirit Counsel is an album by American musician Thurston Moore. A triple album, it was released on September 21, 2019, through Moore and Eva Prinz's record label the Daydream Library Series. It was produced by Prinz and consists of three long instrumental pieces that incorporate elements from Moore's past avant-garde work with his more rock music-oriented output. Spirit Counsel simultaneously serves as both Moore's 12th studio album and second live album because the third piece is a recording of a live performance.
Opener "Alice Moki Jayne" was recorded in 2019 at Les Ateliers Claus, Brussels and was named after Alice Coltrane, Moki Cherry, and Jayne Cortez. An hour-long track, it is one of the album's more rock-oriented compositions, and it features regular collaborators Debbie Googe on bass and James Sedwards on guitar, and is augmented by Jon Leidecker on electronics, Jen Chochinov on guitar, and Jem Doulton on drums.
The second, "8 Spring Street", is a solo guitar composition that pays tribute to Moore's former mentor Glenn Branca. The title is in reference to a Manhattan apartment where Branca once lived in the 1980s. Recorded in 2019 at Wiltoy Way, London, at 29 minutes long, it is the album's shortest track.
The final piece on Spirit Counsel, "Galaxies", is a nearly hour-long recording of a performance at the Barbican Theatre in London where Moore and eleven other musicians played together on 12-string electric guitars. The event, which took place on April 14, 2018, had been billed as "Galaxies: 12x12" and included Moore, Googe, Sedwards, and Chochinov, in addition to Alex Ward, David Toop, Eugene Coyne, James McCartney, Jonah Falco, Joseph Coward, Rachel Aggs, and Susan Stenger. Prior to the performance, Moore had met everyone except Chochinov and Coyne. He attributed inspiration for the event on the Sun Ra poem "The Satellites Are Spinning".
In a 7.8 out of 10 review for Pitchfork, Stuart Berman believed that Spirit Counsel provided listeners "arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore's boundless experimental canon", singling out "Alice Moki Jayne" as a track that both "rewards your patience handsomely" and "showcases his band at strength". AllMusic's Fred Thomas gave a slightly more mixed assessment of the record; while they called it "an ambitious but focused masterwork of Moore's expansive and specific approach to experimental instrumental music", they said it was "Still locked in the trappings and instrumentation of indie rock".
| + Chart performance for Spirit Counsel ! scope="col" | Chart (2019) ! scope="col" | Peak position |
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