Eternal Rhythm: Relatively Clean Rivers
In the mid-1970s, while the mainstream tilted toward gloss and big-studio ambition, Relatively Clean Rivers slipped quietly into the world like a faded postcard from another era. Self-released by Phil Pearlman in 1976, the album didn’t so much chase the spirit of the ’60s as it gently carried its embers into a quieter, more solitary landscape. The war was over, the communes were thinning out, and the dream had shifted shape—but this record didn’t seem to mind. It took its time. It moved like a river does.
Pearlman had already dabbled in the further-out edges of psychedelia with The Beat of the Earth and The Electronic Hole, but Relatively Clean Rivers feels different—less confrontational, more open-hearted. It’s the sound of a man who’d seen the psychedelic explosion up close and decided to steer into something softer, more forgiving. Acoustic guitars ripple underneath laid-back drums, while electric leads wander gently in the margins. There are echoes of the Grateful Dead, a little Workingman’s Dead here, a little American Beauty there, but stripped of any myth-making impulse. Where the Dead reached for the cosmic, Pearlman seemed content to keep things earthbound.
There’s a clarity to the album that cuts through the haze. Songs like “Hello Sunshine” and “Journey Through the Valley of O” aren’t chasing big revelations—they’re small, meditative pieces, full of open space and quiet confidence. The lyrics are simple, sometimes almost plainspoken, but they don’t feel naive. Instead, they carry a gentle conviction, like someone who’s walked a long road and found a bit of peace on the other side.
It’s a rare record that manages to sound homemade and visionary at once. You can hear the tape hiss, the room it was recorded in, the limitations of the equipment - but none of that works against it, if anything, it deepens the charm. The album feels like a private press relic from a parallel America, one where the back-to-the-land ethos never turned sour, and the music stayed rooted in simplicity and grace.
Relatively Clean Rivers isn’t trying to sell you anything. It’s not pushing boundaries or declaring revolutions. It just unfolds, patiently and without fanfare. And somehow, that makes it feel quietly profound - like a letter you didn’t expect, arriving decades later, still somehow right on time.
Phil Pearlman would disappear from the music world not long after the album’s quiet release. There were no follow-ups, no tours, no myth-building. Just this one record, left behind like a field recording from a vanished road trip. And maybe that’s the magic - Relatively Clean Rivers doesn’t ask to be rediscovered, but rewards those who do.