Plankton Wat - The Vanishing World (2026)

As Plankton Wat, Dewey Mahood has created a body of work over the past 20-plus years that is consistently adventurous, emotive, and visionary. It's easy to see, when considering the entire Plankton Wat catalog, how every album is an integral step on the path to the next. Each record, with its own distinct nowness and urgency, presents a singular view from Mahood's perspective.

With The Vanishing World, Plankton Wat takes a prismatic journey through time, exploring textures and moods of the past, present, and future with equal enthusiasm and observance. Featuring freshly produced songs that go back to the early days of Mahood's songwriting, as well as new songs that took shape in the studio, this is an album that looks forward, backward, and inward all at once. It's an energetic, many-faceted project flawlessly executed with care and versatility by a band performing at the height of their powers.

For this album Mahood assembled an all-star band of some of his favorite Portland musicians — Dustin Dybvig (Brass Clouds, Rose City Band, Horse Feathers, Edibles), James Shaver (Abronia, Deep Earth, Million Brazilians), and Victor Nash (Orquestra Pacifico Tropical, The Decemberists, Point Juncture, WA).

As for emotional range, "The Vanishing World is an album about life before the internet," says Mahood, "a time of youth, and playing outdoors with friends. It is an album about dreams, the ocean, California sunshine, Oregon clouds, childhood, vague memories, swimming in rivers, skateboarding, and nostalgia. It is about my feelings as an adult looking back on a life always trying to create art, connect with people, and explore the great outdoors without the use of computers or technology."

The Vanishing World also amazingly captures the high energy of Plankton Wat's live shows over the past 15 or so years. Folks in Portland will immediately recognize performance staples like "Kaldi," "Feather River Canyon," and "Black Satin." Other songs — "Synesthesia" and "Iberia," for example — are the fruits of experimentation in the studio. Two other songs — "Surf King" and "Forgotten Dreams" — find Mahood's textured singing and lyrics woven into visions of awe at Earth's oceans and nostalgia for hazy, early experiences of art.

"Musically I wanted to make a big studio album like the ones bands made in the 1970s," says Mahood. "We had the luxury of spending a lot of time creating overdubs, doing edits, processing sounds etc. There are hard edits and pieces spliced together in an experimental use of the studio. I was very inspired by Can, King Crimson, Brian Eno, and David Bowie, and 70s jazz from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, in making this album. Current artists I've been listening to while making this record include Kikagaku Moyo, the Swedish psych band Goat, Circuit Des Yeux, U.S. Girls, Steve Gunn, Jeff Parker, and SML."

We at Sun Cru are exultant to present The Vanishing World by Plankton Wat to new and longtime listeners alike. The album is an inviting, transcendent journey unto itself. Perhaps nothing provides insight into its making better than Mahood's notes on each song:

Hot Tropics — Inspired by the California coast, and Maui, it's a song about the beauty of beaches, ocean, and sun. Also concern about climate change, and how these places change over time. It's one of the oldest songs on the album. James and I have been playing it for about 10 years. The riffs and structure were influenced by Jimi Hendrix, with a mellow Miles Davis type intro.

Surf King — Another song about the ocean, but with the added factors of wind and fire. It's a about a surfer watching the land burn from the safety of the ocean. I think the idea is the ocean will always provide life, but it's vague. Musically I wanted to write a classic Pacific Northwest style rock song in the style of The Wipers or Dead Moon.

Tentacles — The oldest song on the album, the basic riffs I've been playing since Eternal Tapestry, and this song easily could have been on a follow-up album after World Out Of Time. It's a classic psych rock jam. None of the parts repeat, the song keeps changing and shifting like an octopus on the ocean floor.

Cryptic Fortune — A song about dreaming and the feeling once you wake up trying to remember those dreams. It's a simple folk song at heart, the kind of thing I strum on my acoustic guitar in the evening.

Synesthesia — This was a live-in-the-studio free improvisation. I started playing a few spacey notes on guitar and I asked Dustin, James, and Victor to respond to my playing. We jammed for awhile, and then edited it down to create a floating dream sound. Very influenced by Miles Davis and Can studio experiments.

Forgotten Dreams — Another one about dreaming, and hazy memories. This one inspired by David Lynch and watching old Twin Peaks episodes on grainy VHS tapes. The lyrics tell a tale of vague pieces of dreams. The music is another attempt at classic NW underground sounds of The Wipers, and Unwound.

Kaldi — An old Afrobeat-inspired jam that James and I have been playing for years, originally written with our good friend TJ Thompson playing drums. A huge nod to the wonderful music of Fela, but also Talking Heads. It's our party song! The song title is based on the Ethiopian legend of Kaldi the goatherder who supposedly found the stimulating effects of the coffee bean.

Feather River Canyon — When I was in elementary school my family lived in a little mountain town called Paradise, California, and our house sat at the top of this canyon. I'd hike down there by myself and explore the trees, rocks, and little creeks. My first taste at being truly alone in nature. There's a river that flows across the bottom of the canyon and we swam there a lot when I was a kid. This is a simple folk song about exploring the mountains and river. I've played it as a solo guitar song for about 15 years, at all my solo gigs, but finally recorded it with a band.

Iberia — Another studio experiment! It is two different live improvisations pieced together with a hard splice edit. The first one is a drone I made on guitar and I asked the band to follow along. The second one is a two chord guitar change I played over and over and let James and Dustin improv along. Both are first takes and completely spontaneous, with a good dose of studio magic. The title comes from a trip my wife Loni and I took to Barcelona last spring. We spent a lot of time hanging at the beach, and it was typically very quiet but sometimes a DJ at a bar would spin really loud dance music. This gave me the idea for the harsh transition. Probably the most Can-influenced song I've ever made.

Black Satin — My homage to heavy 1970s prog and metal, equal parts Black Sabbath and King Crimson. Another old one that James and I originally played with TJ on drums, it's been a staple of our live set for 10 years. It's big riffs, but with a funky disco edge conjuring my childhood of BMX, roller skating, skateboarding, and having fun in the sun.