...Relax and Float Downstream

Hail Voyagers!

Well, Sunday here at Trip Inside This House HQ, our subterranean lair replete with stereophonic equipment set up in a vast array to handle damned near any format thrown at us. The High Holy Day looming larger on the event horizon, efforts have been made to sate the appetites of all & sundry over the past few days and today we've something very special. Monumental some might say. I count myself among those some. In point of fact, I stand at the head of said some.

I have, in the past, eschewed requests to "review our CD/album/EP/track." Not because I don't like the music. Words simply-and typically, fail me when it comes to writing about music. Becomes an existential angst akin to explaining color to a born-blind person. Or, the famous quote, "dancing about architecture."

We find ourselves nearly 44 years on from that massive cannon shot across the bowsprit of the entire planet's collective conscious: the August 8, '66, (US) release of Revolver, and-more specifically, "Tomorrow Never Knows."

And yet, after all that time flowing downstream, we're still trapped like bees in amber when it comes to explanations of rock music. (Go 44 years back from this "Zero Point" and you find yourself in 1922. Vaudeville crooners ruled and big bands were just starting to make their way on-stage. They didn't last as long as this rock idiom.) The point being, to me, we don't compare cars of the '20s or '30s to those being made today, nor do we compare those built in '66 or '67. But for this thing we call rock it's often an easy fall-back to compare it to that which has come before as if the summa or high point has already been reached and all else is just a following up the same damned path to Shangri-La. Bollocks.

It's a given, within the psychedelic community, that the experiences one has are not only highly personal and unique to the individual but are oft-times fairly boring to others reading about said experience. Again because words simply fail. It's the "ineffable." Period.

So, what am I on about..? Well, it's June now and I've already heard the best album of 2010. It doesn't get released until October. (!)There will be reviews written. They will use the usual conversational tropes about '60s antecedents, our fore-fathers if you will. Me, I'm not going there. Listening to this album reminds me of the mightiest "ineffable" I'm likely to encounter. A joyous celebration of the inner void we're all trying to get back to, indeed live in. Go on. "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream..." because “Those who know… don’t speak. Those who don’t know… speak.”



Asteroid #4 - Hail To The Clear Figurines