Flu season II

by championtour

It’s still December of 2012

Variety Lights – Central Flow

imagine the awful sound you’d get if you tied theremin at the ends until they made a network like highway infrastructure. Imagine you are traveling down one of its dirt roads, a single offshoot sensing, feeling and even curving like an ant antennae, bent under the weight of a pulley with a pedal on either side. You’re going to the hub. It makes so much noise to go anywhere.

the more modern architecture gets the more it imitates nature in its pathways.

It’s amazing that we can have an emotional reaction to analog synthesizers, seeing how far they are from functioning anything like the human mind. We react more like theremins: erratic, fluid, sensitive to proximity. That’s perhaps why analog sounds have come to define (and have come to be defined by their appearance alongside) sci-fi flicks, especially the kind featuring alien saucers. It’s cliche, but the images and sounds are inextricable.

Variety Lights is the new project from the former frontman of Mercury Rev, David Baker. While Mercury Rev are best known for their later work – a syrupy and morose collusion ; Midsummer’s Night Dream meets American Travelogue – during David Baker’s stay in the group, they created absolute maelstroms. Yerself is Steam, their debut full-length, to this day contains some of the most dense psychedelia ever created, matched with abundant youthful energy.

David Baker’s vocal styling, which switches abruptly between lethargic and feverish, playful and dirge-like, sounds inherently sick. Like the analog synths, it may be simply a cultural association. He does sound quite a lot like Syd Barrett, and due to that has inherited some of his myths.

In one of the albums most memorable choruses, he sings, “I see the medicine through / I’m into two kinds of flu / I feel a song and I won’t be denied anymore”

In the very next line, he’s evoking images of pool parties.

Central Flow doesn’t sound much like it’s for flying saucers, it sounds more like music for glowworms. It’s intensely terrestrial. Musically, it is drawing a picture in the dirt with its toe somewhere between American electronic music pioneers Silver Apples and British industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, but there’s also a healthy dose of dub reggae influence.

Even in an ethereal moment, the ground still has a pretty undeniable sway on you, and it only gets more present from there.

Until the sweetness meets salt, you are so famous (it’s true).