A
rt
rt
|
|
|
|
|
A rt |
|
 |
The world's most essential psychedelic
rock experience should defy rational explanation and scholarly deconstruction.
No tablature can define for you what these latter day cosmic couriers
bring to the table, no lyric sheet will give you access to their text;
you put the music on, close your eyes, and dream your equivalent of
the pond into existence. Bardo Pond has the outward specifications
of a rock band — guitars, bass, keyboards,
drums, occasional but crucial flute and violin and vocals — but the
rivers that converge into the band's oneiric flow have their headwaters
in the outlands of ecstatic jazz, free noise and the avant-garde. Their
slow-motion avalanches of churning instrumentation and voice suggest drugged
states but don't necessarily require them. They alter brain chemistry by
the alchemical effect of distressed sound alone, aspiring to become engineers
of the soul's passage to alternate states of consciousness. At the foundation
of the pyramid, the drums of Jason Kourkounis and the bass of Clint Takeda
lay down a sinewy, sexy and hypnagogic bottom end. At the centre of the
pyramid, the twin guitars of John and Michael Gibbons send out emissaries
of fire, flaying flesh from bone in a storm of holy liberation. Isobel
Sollenberger inhabits the place where the pyramid meets the eye of their
storm, weaving fibres of voice, flute and violin through the din. I heard someone comment recently that the limits of music have now been defined, bracketed by John Cage's silence at one end and Merzbow's maximum noise at the other, leaving only the option of filling the spaces in between. Bardo Pond demonstrate how much scope there is to innovate within that continuum. If rock music is to have any relevance in the new millennium, it is bands like Bardo Pond that will make it so. (by Tony Dale, R.I.P., from a feature in The Ptolemaic Terrascope) |
 |
