And like a dream, or the waking dream of creative action and inspiration, the flow state of this album passes by with temporal swiftness. Caught up in the eddies and swirls we are soon down the stream of consciousness and into a calm clear pool.
The tinkling glockenspiel is like chimes in the wind
Since Thurston Moore has moved to London, the Big Smoke, he seems to have a entered a new flowering of creativity. One of those flowers was the massive blossom of pollinating nectar that appeared with the 2021 release, Spirit Counsel. These were followed with By The Fire and Screen Time. Another bloom has now appeared this year with Flow Critical Lucidity.
The album is currently holding the top spot of heavy rotation on my headphones and stereo, and it is more than well earned. It’s also an instant favorite of the year. The lyrics, the guitar, the electronics, percussion and bass all fuse together into a flowing lucid whole. Part of what makes this and Spirit Counsel such stunning records is the assemblage of other bad ass musicians Moore has pulled into his gravitational field. Deb Googe, from My Bloody Valentine, and Snowpony, has previously collaborated with Moore on his 2014 solo release The Best Day and Spirit Counsel. Other returning musicians from Spirit Counsel include electronics wizard Jon Leidecker, whose long running work as Wobbly and member of Negativland have given my ears hours and hours of pleasure and much to think about. Jem Doulton returns with his penultimate percussive chops. They are all joined by Alex Ward on guitar and clarinet, and the indefatigable James Sedwards on a whole slew of instruments from organ, to glockenspiel, to piano to guitar. It doesn’t hurt that Laetitia Sadler’s voice briefly graces the title track, but that’s really just a minor contribution on an album that name checks Minor Threat and a slew of hardcore bands that still get my energy as moving as they seem to do Moore’s.
The opener “New In Town” is like an ode to beatniks with its mesmeric bongo rhythms, and to punk rock with its evocation of slam dancing and the great hardcore bands that influenced so many of us in the burning days of youth in the poetic lyrics. I’m still high on that punk energy myself, even as my hair is turning gray. The song is a glimpse into the continuity of countercultures, a golden braid weaving between generations., “New In Town” though different musically than the song “Germs Burn” from The Best Day, recalls to mind just how much the energy of punk is still alive in those of us who it has touched. It certainly touched Moore. (These two songs from different albums sound great back to back, by the way.)
The lyrics were written by poet Radio Radieux and are like fragmented jewels that constellate my consciousness with metamodernist imagery. Like lines from Sappho the words in “Hypnogram” evoke tender loving and astral dreams, on a train with headphones on, in the rain, of nights spent in bed with a lover, maybe asleep, maybe embracing. This hypnotic postcard from the hypnagogic world of lucid dreams is one to really get stuck in my head.
Vertical height with vantage points out to the surrounding landscape ::
“We Get High” has some of that same punk energy, with its thundering bass jolts and volts, but it’s not the straight edge kind. This is the kind of punk you might have heard on the Angus Maclise song “The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda.” It’s a trip up to a Shinto shrine on a Japanese mountain to hang out with the Taj Mahal Travellers. That’s the kind of height this song achieves. Vertical height with vantage points out to the surrounding landscape. This recalls that same kind of ecstatic trance in music from Spirit Counsel, the music that takes you out of your body through the gate of the ears and into some kind of holy communion magic. Maybe it’s the Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann we are ascending with Moore and company. Maybe it’s the Holy Mountain of Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’m high on it though, and the tinkling glockenspiel is like chimes in the wind, spirits flying around up in these rarified realms that music has the power transport us to.
Each song goes into a different terrain and the terrain itself changes as the songs progress. On “Rewilding” Moore sings about “coral morphological dreaming,” as the electronics provided by Leidecker coruscate around in a haze of distortion and motoric drums pound in perfect mesmeric pulses, the distortion and guitars rewilding my energy, tapping into the batteries charged back when I was slam dancing. It’s suddenly there again, that propulsion and drive.
“The Diver” sums up the album as it penetrates the promised depths like a scuba diving scout on a mission to uncover a lost Atlantis full of artistic treasure. It’s a microtonal guitar painting in plein air as impressionistic light gets refracted through rippling watercolors.
And like a dream, or the waking dream of creative action and inspiration, the flow state of this album passes by with temporal swiftness. Caught up in the eddies and swirls we are soon down the stream of consciousness and into a calm clear pool. The album is over, but I want to ride back up to the launch point and get in the canoe again to ride back down its rocking rapids.
Flow Critical Lucidity is available on Daydream Library Series / Radieux Radio . [Bandcamp]
