There is every reason why Marble Sheep's Meets Circle Triangle Square should not work. Marble Sheep, once a noisy staple of the PSF stable, had quickly evolved into an '80s Dead-style blues jam band. Circle Triangle Square, or Maru-Sankaku-Shikaku -- the radical street troupe known properly by the symbols for a circle, a triangle, and a square -- contained only one original member, leader Sakuro Kant Watanabe, and were no longer the commune-dwelling, cop-battling, avant-psychonauts they once were (presumably). Yet, after Marble Sheep's Ken Matsutan reissued Maru-Sankaku-Shikaku's privately pressed LPs from the early '70s, the two joined forces to make a contemporary album in the tradition of the classic Japanese side-long freak-outs. In addition to Watanabe, this version of Maru-Sankaku-Shikaku contained a pair of trumpets, a pair of didgeridoos, a pair of throat-singing jaw harpers, and lots of percussion. Cosmic Garden leans hard into the drone, and the members of Marble Sheep lay low. While the collective establishes a pulse halfway through, amid didgeridoos and Matsutan's subtle leads, it remains at least partially anarchistic for its 18-minute duration. The same cannot be said of the 15-minute Love Chant, which succumbs to Marble Sheep's semi-tropical jam band grooves. Two shorter tracks succeed (Paradox) and fail (Cosmic Garden Eternal) by the same metrics. The one-track bonus disc provides the strongest jam, In the Love Forest, where Marble Sheep again lay out in favor of the untrained enthusiasm of Watanabe's ensemble. A nostalgia act, perhaps, but one with some very nice moments. ~ Jesse Jarnow, Rovi

1		Cosmic Garden
2		Love Chant
3		Paradox
4		Cosmic Garden Eternal
5		In the Love Forest
6		[Untitled]