christ, somehow i’m still catching up with last years divined finds, trepidatious purchases, enthused borrows and sweaty-illicit mail packages. this came out lord knows when (october maybe) and i’ve only just got round recently to tuning out and dropping off. dunno why it’s taken so long given my love for the part wild horses / hunter gracchus lot that this square-peg-rectangular-hole mingles with.
winnowed from the polymath, alchemist, “the man who could walk through in-between positions”, arch black duke of maknovischina, peripatetic flux ingester haji gutterpup ustad’s almanac, his scribblings and tapes spanning 31 yrs, “non-euclidean elucidation of shamanic ecstacies” was hastily transcribed and assembled sixty nadis travel west of sahiwal by an assemblage of vamachara hounds and the abdals of rum wearing black mantles and animal hides over their shoulders with pouches of flint and herbs. some with felt cloaks carrying drums, bells and horns, sometimes screaming. others carrying large yellow spoons, iron rings, sucai clubs, ankle bones and singing bowls. swords drawn across their chests and snakes twining the arms. after 30 days of pitri they sculpted 10 psychic enemas.
aye…
what it is is forty five minutes of semi-attentioned kindof-structured chaos by syed kamran ali. what i dig about this is the punkness of it all. not in the traditional sense, or the modern (non)sense, or even the political unsense. a kindof shamanic ritual punkness. musically my thoughts keep coming back to crass for reasons i can’t even begin to explain. maybe the sense of giddy anarchy and bubble-pricking glee of early rimbaud, voucher et al…
oh the bedlam at it’s hash-hazy heart, the mashing of percussion and reeds and strings and noise and chatter, the juxtaposition of mathematic and satorial gibberish. kinetic veers and gesticulating meanders down a rather winding winding road. the telling track here being the flickering interference / tribal percussion gumbo of mumbai item number, like foreign city taxi cab radio squawk and squall:
….. twists dial….. bell tones and huffed vocal tremors atop free jazz creaking….. twists dial….. polyethnic pop strum and mangled percussive found sounds….. twists dial….. elastic beats and chanter squeal melt over distorted vox….. twists dial….. field recordings street recordings and garage rock strut….. twists dial…..
there’s a proper gnarly disorientation at work here, jumping from lightning bolt noise to gang gang dance industro-rhythms to sublime frequencies otherworld raveups to constellation concrète folk burbles. an interesting confusion over what’s real and made-up, what’s hokum and what’s authentic (and does it even matter?). which i suppose would maybe chuck it in the sun city girls camp. like some hissing-crude torch of the mystics haunted transmission through cerebral hypno-waves direct to yr inner shaman.
