Secret Chiefs 3
Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws – HURQALYA
Amarillo
This is from beyond. If you play this for any middle-class suburbanite kid or adult, they will most likely tell you to turn it off. If you ever try to project what Trey Spruance’s next album is going to sound like, you will be far from correct. He’s always one step ahead.
There are two very cool, pleasant, acoustic ballads on this disc, “The Rose Garden of Mystery” (featuring some very tasteful trumpet playing by Trey) and “Mera Pyar Shalimar” (which Mump-Dase says is annoying because it sounds like something you’d hear during the credits of a Japanimation movie), both composed by a person named R.D. Burman. Who is that?! Is this person still alive? I feel cheated that there are people on earth even more obscure than Secret Chiefs 3. I think Spruance discovered some secret vault or treasure chest somewhere full of crazy-ass philosophy and science books and musical manuscripts from a long-lost phrygian-dominant-loving civilization.
In contract to the serene ballads mentioned above, “Beyond the Mountain of Qaf” begins with thirty seconds of wind, then forty-five seconds of sitar, then it sounds like someone slowly kicked on about 300 distortion pedals, at which point it turns into hideous white noise that slowly takes over until it is absolutely unbearable. That lasts about 2 minutes. Then it sounds like lots of wood creaking and boats rowing, then rain. What the hell? Then there’s “Renunciation,” composed by another mysterious being named Ananda Shankar. Now who is that? “Jabalqa” is a hyper-techno-digitally-spliced-hell-dance-incantation.
A very long-winded text on the inside of the CD-booklet begins with:
“Call us old-fashioned, but whenever we self-righteously draw our pagan bow-strings back, our arrows are aimed at Beauty and Truth. We usually miss. But we try to make damn sure those ill-shot arrows hit ground somewhere near the region of Entertainment!”
OK, that makes sense so far, but by the time I get to the end of the text: “If we, as Hurqalyavis, can see things in the theatrum of suprasensory universes, we will have closed the coffin on this representative theater’ as our only real Work will be to part the red sea’ between this and the real Theater of Cruelty’.” Sure thing. Do that. Amarillo Records, 5714 Folsom Boulevard, Suite 300, Sacramento, CA 95819. Web of Mimicry, P.O. Box 614, Eureka, CA 95502, http://www.humboldt1.com/~mimicry
