This is a repost from
May 2008:
... Which brings me to
Harmony Rockets, who released a single full-length CD in 1995 entitled
Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void.
The music on this CD consists of one single piece of music lasting 41
minutes and 40 seconds. One website calls it an "experimental album of
epic proportions," and I would not disagree with that description. The
band set up shop in a hotel in upstate New York and just played. They
forgot about
verses and
choruses and
beginnings and
ends and
scales and
chords and
keys
and just kind of improvised some spacefreak music of magnificent
proportions. Yet, there's some precedent for what they do: I detect bits
and pieces of Sun Ra and even parts of the Velvet Underground's
unreleased (at least in a studio version) "Melody Laughter."
But
you don't have to know or care about that. How does it sound? For all
of its so-called experimental nature, it actually sounds rather cordant
(I know that's not a word, but I wish it was) and not at all cacophonic.
The band--seven people--use guitars with massive effects, a rumbling
bass, a saxophone that weaves in and out. A voice murmurs words and
sentences for a while. It builds, it ebbs, at one point sounding like
you're literally in the middle of a cyclone (in the key of C). The music
slows down everything and puts your existence to total slow motion.
Great to listen to while you're waiting for someone to show up. And the
conclusion is like a reprieve, you feel the light sweat on your upper
lip, as if you're just coming out of a dream. I highly recommend it for
those who might be a little adventurous and have about an hour to kill
late... late... very late at night.
Point of note for
artifact fetishists: the original CD came in a beautiful package, with
silver embossed writing on the cover. The CD also comes with a picture
of the tape machine used to record the album. The liner notes say the
following:
Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void
was performed live at Rhinecliff Hotel by the group Harmony Rockets. It
was recorded on a hand-held Arrivox-Tandberg 183 analog cassette
recorder. Due in part to the out-dated [sic] nature (ancient by today's
standards) of this machine and an inadequate P.A. system . . . periodic
portions of the music undulate and appear to distort. . . . Thus, the
sounds on this disc are unaltered, and remain true to the nature of the
original performance.
An important point to make
here is this: Harmony Rockets was basically a side-project of the much
better-known band
Mercury Rev who produced a bunch of great albums in
the 1990s, including the classic
Yerself Is Steam, one of the most insanely fantastic albums of that decade. Speaking of
Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void, Jonathan Donahue, the lead singer of Mercury Rev, later noted, responding to an interviewer:
Donahue:
It's mostly instrumental, but there's some vocals on the beginning of
it, it's me singing. Basically, what it is, is most of Mercury Rev,
that you see up there [on stage],
were trying to kill a Friday night in the mountains, got really wasted
and wandered down to a local Civil War bar. They needed an opening
band, so we brought some old analog effects with us and some guitars
and just whooped up whatever we were doing for, like, forty minutes and
stopped. Somebody had a tape, figuring it was ya know, Mercury Rev, so
they sorta recorded it shittily.
Interviewer: So, the entire album is live?
Donahue:
Yeah, just made up on the spot. There's not a damn thing that was
practiced ever, it just sort of happened, but it came out really nice.
We like it, we were pretty surprised.
Looking up my trusty 1,088 page version of
The Great Indie Discography (2nd ed), I see that Harmony Rockets released one other thing, an e.p.. That stuff is very very different from
Paralyzed Mind: on the e.p. they cover "I've Got a Golden Ticket" from
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
and (of all things) Vangelis' "L'Apocalypse des Animaux." The music
veers from disco to moody instrumentals. Not really worth tracking down.
