Transmissions

Dream Encounters At The Lunatic Birdhouse

The Cozm x Transmissions Album review by Lisa Thatcher. Sydney, september 9th 2014.

The artist as dreamer has a choice, made for him out of the field between.

Cozm x Transmissions, an experimental sound art collective of Belgium devoted to Imaginal Music, the currently - tantalizingly real as it is ephemeral – Altered Field of Dreamtime become the unique source of a kind of sound that manifests in very real, very audible, deeply beautiful music.

 The Cozm X Transmissions' latest album "Dream Encounters at the Lunatic Birdhouse" (Fag Ash Records) kept reminding me of the Saint-Pol-Roux “ideorealism” and his quest for images that might filter the evidence of his sensory experiences. Cozm X Transmissions here build music out of the dreamscape and arrive at something we hear with recognition, even if communicating our understanding essentially takes place apart from language.

Track one is  a mantra-like, ‘First Encounter on the day of the Unquiet grave,’  the manifestation of the connective experiments between musician Rev Zombi and the exquisite voice of Austrian sound poet Marie-Luise Weiss, here manifesting as Archangel Gong, who enters the consciousness with an aching for awareness, that lays itself in strips of breathy requests over the top of electrified clap sticks, searing static and the occasional sparkling tinkles of a wayward piano. An appeal to bring all sensory awareness into the other worldliness. It’s the fitting introduction for a record that is more journey than sound experience. Make no call for clarity here – this is the place where such demands become a liability and work against the transitional nature of this kind of journey within.

Track two, ‘Second Encounter on the Dreamshore of Ikonic Tomorrows’ begins with the ominous rumbling of a piano’s keys against beautifully timed static, pausing only to burst into a series of small chimes that occur like star burst, over the distant breathy call of Archangel Gong. Paying careful attention to the sound-empty space, Rev Zombi brings the sounds in like intruders, clamouring for attention like disparate souls seeking a place to assert themselves. Silence is the god of music here, and sound is both the intruder and the validation of silence. Archangel Gong comes back with her erotic ramblings, but this time words are sublimated against presence, the many sounds overlapping to feed and in a way, obliterate her. Sound becomes its own kind of breath, melding into a mesh of inhalations and exhalations that eventually coalesce and desist, leaving a ringing note and the schizophrenic whispers of Archangel Gong. Enormously sensual, this is dream music, music to lay in dark with, music to invite into the body.

‘Final Encounter in the Ancient Village’ brings a heady, heavy metallic drone to the album, something guttural and rumbling as if the sounds of track two are working united toward a shared objective. Its a swelling track, building aural alchemy inside the body that accepts the invitation in the first two tracks. Archangel Gong is more guide than subject here, whispering from the distant dark, her observations serving as sentinel, watching over the sound as it marches relentlessly forward. Here is an adherence to musical tropes and heritage of drone, but the aural image remains staunchly inside the march toward something. Perhaps toward a radical listening that allows for the isolated patchwork of sleep and all its demented otherworldliness? By the time the listening dreamer reaches track three, ‘Night Spell in the Lunatic Birdhouse of the Midnight Skull’, the immersion is complete and liquefied sounds of a drowning in the self take the trust consciousnesses has offered as if it were an outstretched hand.

Closing track ‘Escape Dream Through’, is an invitation back including an open window and a microphone held upon the rush of traffic noise surrounding the electronic melodious tap at the surface of who we like to imagine we are. This is a voiceless return, the Archangel left deep inside, a kind of immutable cure we can visit in the place that exists between dreams and waking. It’s almost as if she has been deposited into us, planted so as to confuse our sense of proportion, her extended hand always available for another visit into the ocean inside.

Encountering the completion of the Cozm X Transmissions journey, I am again reminded of Saint-Pol-Roux and his awareness of the hallucinatory power of the irrational and its function as a source of creative inventiveness. Harnessed successfully, the audacious suggestion of Dream Encounters At the Lunatic Birdhouse is that more is possible in this place than we can rationally comprehend and if we weren’t so afraid of our self-induced psychedelic journeys, perhaps we’d operate less from fear and more from the imagination in our attempts to create ourselves new each day.