Tag Archives: Sun Ra

Hallelujah Mars Angel: Magma’s Köhntarkösz Anteria (2004)

I am a musician, but I’m another type of musician

-Sun Ra

The fanfare here in some way a reminder, The Check Engine Light Is On, America; choir seems to be chanting Harrison Ford, and maybe it is time to wonder about questions of archeology.

I find it may be easiest to describe this expedition in the alien progressive case, that from here, you are no longer merely strumming along, you are floating, weightless momentarily, the nausea will subside, you will see. In these broadcasts we have inverted languages and an orb spinning the similingling-lahng repeated in choir of some strange and highly evolved kinds of creatures. Paranoia inducing repetitions, hypnotic in their insistence and then. Spaces. A frantic energy always evolving in and around the fact that it never ends, it is never ending, but just evolving, changing shapes, the winding around themselves lines, as if tied to one another. In modulation and variation, waxing rhapsodic these are Kind and Gentle Folk, the selfsame you heard tell about in the Sagas of your tribe. Consider their simple invective: soønsoøndoveresang chameleons asking us, pleading us, the audience of one, in the head phones, to just listen. The, shall we say God-like Listener. Well she thinks that an album can be a love letter to the apocalypse, to the concept of infinity, and he to the fact that there is only so much time for these matters. Egregious Self Aware And Thereby Kind of Annoying Digression: Stevie Wonder’s first record is called Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius. A warm welcome from many humans follows. I would play Köhntarkösz to Stevie Wonder and ask him what he thinks. If I had the vinyl. 

 

This is best seen as a kind of voyage, you see, maybe it always is with Magma, or must have been. But it’s a voyage inside the parenthesis, you know, your parenthesis (the mind. The mind, your own mind, you can hold it and it holds nothing, it holds everything, there will be an epic poem, you are thinking in your mind, an epic poem for multiple voices, in multiples, to adopt a kind of ambitious scope your mind is then also a sprint towards infinity and to know how to have written this, to hold that key change, that threatening ooh that compelling ahh. Each a ship you can sail. It is hardly surprising, then, that I have entirely lost track of the time, has it been 11 minutes or 44. A broken chromometer, isn’t that what you call it in your solar system? And, since I’ve got you here, yes, it sounds like it’s coming from the inside of a goddamn volcanic mountain, a hollow mountain, I suppose, recorded, and it came from a book, a very special book, a very special ancient book with calligraphy and illustrations, the choir all suddenly fi-fi-fa-fa set-ah and neither you nor I even know what they look like, but picture hooded types, robes, funky and zany outer space chic, the tallest one the least interesting, the tallest one the most interesting. Riding the equivalent of horses, into swirling unrest, into storms, it is certainly raining.

-Mark Gurarie