And since we’re talking about dudes who are on it, why don’t we add Gnod to the party?
This is where maelstromic trance goes dark. My only complaint is it ain’t long enough, but I don’t think it ever could be.
I’ve noticed I type less and less words with my posts these days. This can only be a good thing.
Whims, eh? There’s actually a fair bit I’ve discovered lately, but I’m on the wrong PC and have bad memory. Otherwise I suspect I’d bombard you with another buses series.
How often do I need to post the work of Julius Gabriel? Probably as often as he does it. Dude is properly on it. So is his partner in this maelstrom, João Pais Filipe, who you will also hear in the next post, equally maelstromic. Neologisms, eh? I love ’em. This is the musical equivalent.
This be the second Paisiel album, so I hope it means there will be more.
This album will not appeal to many. But those who it does will fackin love it.
You could not predict this. You could not algorithm it. No AI or machine intelligence could begin to parse or grok this in any way. This is humans at their very, most outrageous best.
The above paragraph is probably influenced by my reading of a newsletter called The Convivial Society which lands in my inbox every now and again and whose premise is very close to my heart.
That Julius Gabriel fella just keeps on delivering, no?
There aren’t many artists that predominantly produce instrumental music who nevertheless keep me interested. It’s a very difficult approach to music to do consistently well (albeit quite easy to adopt a phone-it-in approach). Whatever well he’s tapped, it is one deep well. I was very regularly feeling that ecstatic feeling I get when I listen to music that is so perfectly put together that it could be thought of as a self contained universe in its own right, albeit – and not actually paradoxically – also open-ended. Like life.
As is always the case when I sit down to do a post, my words dry up and lose any sparkle that I might have thought they had when they raced around my head. It’s not all bad, though. Just press play and enter the trance enfolded into the music – all the sparkle you’ll need is there. And we all need sparkle in these times.
So take the scars from your eyes and remove the bars
there is no cage except in your imagination
The objective truth can only be perceived subjectively
Thinking is subversive
Rumours of my exaggeration have now died
The best way to learn boundaries is to cross them
It’ll teach you how valuable they are
So God plugged the universe in. “Let there,” he began, “be sound.”
And he turned us on.
After the ending of the world, it can take a few days to start assembling a new one
Don’t ask what you should do, ask what you can do
I state the obvious daily, so I am accustomed to blank looks…
Before I go off on a larger point, let me tell you about this album in my wishlist by an outfit called Loosers.
Hot Jesus is a sonic mishmash of hypnagogic 80s style synths and AOR blended with early 90s rave-culture sounds, mixed with a kind of kosmiche style repetitive delay-guitar riff style supporting a more solo-ey approach. There’s a rock rhythm foundation with percussive polyrhythms appearing regularly, sometimes approaching Gamelan structure in complexity. The last tune particularly puts me in mind of Nathaniel Mayer. If you can think of a handy label to accurately convey what I’ve tried to describe there, feel free.
Loosers themselves are a Portuguese group with whom I was previously unfamiliar; on this release they are joined by vocalist Jerry the Cat, who has spent time with Funkadelic it says here. They are remarkably difficult to find anything out about, though.
Of course, I would like to know what their name is communicating at me. Are they a collective of people who are looser than everyone else? Or are they making what is a sadly all-too-common mistake these days, and they actually mean Losers, as in people who lose rather than win?
For those of you unaware, if you mean the word where you’re not winning, you only want one letter o. If you have two letter o’s, you literally loosen the letter s that follows into the softer sounding version. The one where it sounds like a z requires only one o.
Do you see what I did there? It supports my larger point, which is to do with the power of language. Language is the oldest technology that man has consistently used, and it has continually evolved for that length of time too. This means that the tool we have at our disposal, if used properly, is incredibly powerful. It’s not perfect, though, and I reckon that’s probably my underlying theme in my more creative aspects, particularly the doodle-blog.
Unfortunately, people are more and more slapdash in their use of language these days. I’ll give you an example – the word ‘awesome’ is an adjective from the word ‘awe’ which actually means something mighty, something to be marvelled at but also to be feared more than just a little bit. The word ‘awesome’ as it is now popularly used, though, simply seems to mean ‘quite good.’ (I would refer you to a ghastly youtube thing called Little Kelly, but actually, no, stay away, for the love of God, stay away for the good of your sanity).
Words are used out of context more and more often, people simply thinking that others will know what they mean. No, we do not know what you mean because we are not you (except on a much larger metaphysical level, maybe, but that’s a discussion for another time and person). And it is my hypothesis that the reason we have such a confused world at the moment is because people are not clear about what they say to each other. Communication is incoherent; ergo, the world is incoherent.
So, think about the words you use. Yes, this may mean you use fewer of them. Probably that would make social media much less busy. What’s not to like?
Of course, if Loosers are in fact a collective of people who really are communicating that they are looser than the average, then the above opinion is not relevant to this post. I still stand by it, though.
Black Bombain seem to me to be born collaborators. Their live jam from late last year was a seriously good piece of music, and if you haven’t heard their collaboration with Gnod, then you should know that Black Gnod’s Innerspace recording comes with the highest possible recommendation from Soundbergs Towers.
This time they’ve teamed up with free jazz maestro Peter Brötzmann, himself no stranger to the collaborative arts, resulting in a superlative work of one of my favourite sub-mashup-genres, saxophone psych. There should be more horns and brass atop these swirling guitar maelstroms generally, and I speak as a guitarist who never used to like brass at all. Brass is the one class of instrument I absolutely cannot play at all, which may be related; however, it adds a tonal element to the ‘psych-rock’ mix which complements it superbly. A whole field with relatively few visitors.
It fascinates me how music that quite obviously came together on the spot can nevertheless sound so coherent and, you know, purposive. Having done some improv over the years (all the best Itto tunes came into being that way) I have an idea; it’s like tuning into some music and being the vehicle of its expression rather than ‘separate’ beings somehow all being creative in the same way at the same time. Maybe we receive before we can transmit? On a very basic level, that is exactly true – you have to listen to your collaborators (receive) if you want to complement the overall sound (transmit). However, there were times when all of us suddenly changed direction at the same time without prompt – you can’t put those experiences into words, and neither can you take the idea of a flat universe seriously anymore.
The music comes with the guarantee that it is good, not that it will make you think mystical things, although that may happen if you are so inclined. You can score it from shhpuma or Lovers and Lollipops
Fantasy collaboration time: imagine Valerio Cosi collaborating with Oneida? (drools like Homer Simpson…)
Soundbergs 