Amazonia Ambient Project -The Young Gods & Jeremy
Narby
The electro-noise terrorists from Geneva moved to ambient. For their
new album they collected sounds in Upper Amazonia. In concert the trio
is joined by Jeremy Narby, American anthropologist-writer in the rank
of Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary. The surround sound, seats only
performance carries you directly to the heart of shaman culture.
The
Young Gods traced their origins back to 1982, when Geneva-based frontman
Franz Treichler, increasingly bored with his then-current new wave
band, began experimenting with a small sampler. Influenced as well
by the visceral power of punk and the grand drama of classical music,
he began creating abrasive guitar and drum loops. He founded the Young
Gods in 1985; named in an honor of a Swans composition, the trio debuted
a year later with Envoyé!, a brief, blistering single distilling their
assaulting sound to its core. Produced by Swan Roli Mosimann, their
self-titled debut LP followed in 1987, and was named Album of the Year
by the British music weekly Melody Maker.
The Young Gods are best known as an explosive live act, but their latest
composition, Music for Artificial Clouds is ambient and dreamlike.
It furthers the band's excursions into introspective territory, such
as instrumental album Heaven Deconstruction, with its contemplative
and minimalist tones, as well as Franz Treichler's recent compositions
for choreographer Gilles Jobin, and Second Nature, the band's latest
album. Music for Artificial Clouds is meditative music for relaxation.
It draws listeners into a state of availability and seeks to link them
to the world, rather than to extract them from it. As Brian Eno put
it: "Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening
attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable
as it is interesting." The album is also environmental music,
based on a composition initially played at the Arteplage of Yverdon
on the shores of Lake Neuch_tel, during Swiss national exposition Expo.02.
The band approached composing the piece by looking for organic sounds
generated by computer, which they then mixed with a bank of natural
sounds recorded by Franz Treichler during a recent trip to the Amazonian
rainforest. The resulting musical landscape is inhabited by imaginary
animals, resonant plants, electronic breezes, distant melodies and
artificial clouds. The live performance features the anthropologist
Jeremy Narby, who talks about his explorations of shamanic cultures
in Amazonia. Besides teaching at Stanford University, Narby has written
several books, including Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of
Knowledge.
Like Carlos Castaneda orTimothy Leary, Narby deals with
relation between western science, hallucinogens and sorcery.
FOREST TELEVISION (excerpt from narration by Jeremy
Narby)
Surprisingly, the Ashaninca who accompanied me in the forest had names
for almost every plant, and ascribed uses to about half of them. They
use plants as food, building materials, cosmetics, dyes and medicines.
I soon saw that they have an almost encyclopaedic understanding of plant
properties. They know plants that accelerate the healing of wounds, cure
diarrhea, or heal chronic back-ache. I tried these plant remedies on
myself each time the occasion arose, only to find that they worked. So
I began asking my Ashaninca consultants how they knew what they knew
about plants. Their answer was enigmatic. They said knowledge about plants
comes from the plants themselves, and ayahuasqueros, tabaqueros, or shamans,
take a hallucinogenic plant brew called ayahuasca, or eat tobacco concentrate,
and speak in their visions with the essences, or spirits, which are common
to all life forms and are sources of information. They said nature is
intelligent and speaks with people in visions and dreams.
But
one night after four months in this village, I was in a neighbouring
village drinking manioc beer with some men and asking them about the
origin of their plant knowledge. And one man said: "Hermano Jeremias,
Brother Jeremy, if you want to know the answer to your question, you
have to drink ayahuasca, and if you like I can show you some time." He
called it the television of the forest and said it allowed one to see
images and learn things.
I grew up in Switzerland, where LSD is an indigenous product, so I
had tried it several times and thought I knew about this sort of thing.
So I said ok. Several nights later I found myself with this ayahuasquero
on the platform of a quiet house surrounded by the sounds of the forest.
He administered the ayahuasca, which is a bitter brew, then, after
a long silence, he started singing songs in the dark, loops of ungraspable
sounds and slightly dissonant melodies. Images appeared in my mind,
and I soon found myself surrounded by enormous fluorescent serpents
that were 15 yards long and 1 yard high, hair-raisingly real, which
started talking to me in a kind of thought language, telling me things
that were painfully true about myself. They said, you are just a human
being, a tiny human being. And I saw, looking at them, that they were
right, that my materialist perspective had limits, starting with its
presupposition that what my eyes were showing me did not exist. And
I saw that my worldview had bottomless arrogance, which caused it to
collapse in front of me.
Web:
www.theyounggods.com
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