$8.99
Sold by music on Tradebit
The world's largest download marketplace
3,301,273 satisfied buyers
The world's largest download marketplace
3,301,273 satisfied buyers
MP3 Copernicus - Cipher and Decipher
10 MP3 Songs in this album (70:04) !
Related styles: Rock: Progressive Rock, Avant Garde: Experimental, Mood: Intellectual
People who are interested in Captain Beefheart Jim Morrison Moon Dog should consider this download.
Details:
The conceptual concerns of the New York performer-poet Copernicus address the universe, itself. He is not distracted by everyday matters – penning emotional couplets about the changing fortunes of human existence (other than, perhaps, on the grandest or lowliest scales!). He speaks of subatomic matter, the impact of metaphysics on mankind, and refuses to bear any glad tidings.
It all happened in Hoboken, New Jersey, in November 2008, when Copernicus gathered together a large ensemble of improvising musicians and booked a session dedicated to existential immersion (or possibly non-existential immersion). Many of these are artists that he''s worked with for more than two decades, all of them attuned to the willing abandonment of pre-meditation, well-versed in the dangers of deliberate free-fall.
The longtime musical director of Copernicus'' assemblage is the Irish keyboardist and composer Pierce Turner, long resident in New York City. His fellow countryman, Black 47 leader Larry Kirwan is one of the album''s four guitarists, along with Mike Fazio, Bob Hoffnar and César Aragundi.
The first wave of that session led to the release of Disappearance (NCD 2091, distributed by MoonJune) in 2010. Now, Copernicus has turned his attention to a second phase of that same recording date, responding to improvisations that took on a different shape, making yet another twist, exposing another nature. The new album, Cipher and Decipher, continues the evolution of Copernicus'' ideas. He continues to view his entire output as a chronological adventure of discovery, a documentation of his development.
Copernicus relates how he could feel the raw power in the recording studio, with his carefully chosen players fired up create what amounted to 25 pieces of work, all laid down in four hours. Copernicus thrives on acting as a conduit for this smouldering real-time energy, a circumstance which is far preferable to the more common strategy of overdubbing vocal contributions. He explains that this spontaneity was matched with a more studied period of months which involved careful mixing and post-production. The mixes evolved from crude to polished.
"He is inside the quantum world," mulls Copernicus. "He is no longer viewing the quantum world from the outside. His body is energy and there are sparks inside his body as the electrons move in orbit and connect to other atoms, and as he lays on the beach, the ocean comes and causes the sparks in his body to sizzle. Step by step, he is moving into the subatomic world and accepting the subatomic as the basis for reality. It is an adventure in abandoning the world perceived by the human senses as a false illusionary world not worthy of intelligent, thinking people."
Cipher And Decipher opens with its players setting up a propulsive vamp for "Into The Subatomic", with Turner''s organ prominent as Copernicus jumps straight into a charged narration. There''s serious momentum in place, as the band rockets hard under the poetic declamations. A guitar rises up, howling, soon joined by its equally-disturbed sibling. "Free At Last!" adopts a slower, steadily building motion, but it remains riff-based, bejewelled with guitar and organ spirals.
Copernicus is the grand orator, given a suitably expansive stage, as a fruity saxophone solo continues the ascension, a tuba huff underlaying. "Mud Becomes Mind" begins with an emphatic Brazilian feel, an unusual sense of syncopation for Copernicus. He adapts instantaneously to this North Eastern forró-influenced sound, grainy fiddle bowing in the role of a cuíca drum.
A retro-cosmic synthesiser figure backgrounds Copernicus as he opens "I Don''t Believe", a hovering chorus of other-worldly warblings and bass-loaded orchestrations, like a submerged street band, marching into the ocean. The funk locks together for "Matter Is Energy", but keeping the abstracted swirlings active around its perimeter. As "Comprehensible" rolls onward, Larry Kirwan sets up a vocal refrain of ''Set the controls further out of the sun'', paraphrasing The Pink Floyd. Then, next up, "Infinite Strength" is based around Van Morrison''s "Gloria", first recorded by Them in 1964. ''Gloria'' becomes ''Bacteria''. Copernicus is more pointed with "Where No One Can Win", specifically referring to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, accompanied by suitably Middle Eastern string and flute sounds.
There''s a return to Latin beats on "Step Out Of Your Body", which favours a samba rock momentum, the brass once again setting up a street-parading sensation. (… Or are there also strains of South African jazz?) The album closes with "The Cauldron", an epic that makes a return to tentative spaciousness. Eventually, a sparse drumbeat kicks in, followed by a stinging guitar figure. Piano jabs sporadically and the horns begin to waddle, as the piece gathers its linear force. In the end, the evolution heads towards an angular form of jazz-funk.
Copernicus has already mapped the likely course of his future recordings. "They will explore the possible adaptation of the subatomic to the illusionary world of humanity, in a possible government that forms its laws with the recognition that all unaided perceptions of the human senses are illusions and therefore all laws must be based on the concept that nothing exists. Cipher And Decipher describes the human inside the subatomic, and future albums will describe the human using the quantum world to define its intellectual daily life, where war will not be an option. All thought will be based on quantum reality and quantum reality negates all existence."
Copernicus continues to step outside himself:
"Copernicus sees his job as philosophically interpreting the modern discoveries of professional physicists to the human situation. His ideas are original interpretations. He has musicians capable of creating sounds as he delivers his lines, most of which are spontaneous, drawn from a spontaneous or preconceived theme. The theme determines the piece. The music and inspiration determine the delivery. Something going on in the studio could become part of the piece or be incorporated into the delivery of the theme. Copernicus struggles not to repeat his themes. Thus came the need to write books after the fifth album, from which many of the themes were derived. Copernicus is trying to paint the entire human situation.
"Unfortunately, or fortunately, for humanity, he has come to the conclusion that humanity does not exist, was never born and fortunately, can never die. His ideal of the real is the subatomic and he rejects the entire world determined by the human senses. He is trying to paint that subatomic world, with the participation of a human consciousness. The factors that governed the pieces of the album are: 1.) has the theme been covered before? If yes, then is this a new way of expressing the same theme? 2.) Is the theme a step deeper in interpretation than what has been recorded before? As Copernicus has evolved, a good many of the pieces that find themselves on previous albums would no longer be acceptable to a present day Copernicus. 3.) Copernicus loves the theme and feels its power and importance and knows that the theme fits into the puzzle that he is trying to construct. The worst thing in the world for Copernicus is to state something that would come into conflict with what was stated before, unless the argument could be shown that Copernicus has evolved into a new concept, since all of the Copernicus albums are documenting the evolution of an old-world human confronting modern physics."
File Data