Mikel Dimmick Spiral Joy Band

more from Mikel at his myspace site and at another site he's set up to handle longer recordings.

Nights of transport, with the shuttle-saucers scheduled to pick up from the XYZ Gallery, a sonic exhibition by and of the Mikel Dimmick Spiral Joy Band. The program is for an ecstatic evening of strings and no-strings, scales and no-scales, amps and no-amps...all-encompassing, all-eveloping, seen and unseen...cascading under-, over- and through-tones -- toward new tones, true tones, and ...... Pluton-ians. The music of fire and floes, incinerator wheel and white fang, Harry Truman and Ernest Shackleton. Likely a request for some minor sting of your wallet to lighten the purchase of more and larger gongs. Celebration of new metal, requieum for lost seasons, the eternal one-song continues with a dirge for new gongs. The hum of consternation and no-consternation, the dance of slow shifting and lightning stasis. "Pleasure is the headlight on the black diamond train." "Hello, friends," as John McLaughlin intones at the start of some Shakti record, the sheer baked-ness of his voice outdoing any of the nonsense to follow. In such a spectrum of vibe, the musickal doings of Spiral Joy fall in those first three syllables, rather than among the thousands of tabla beats to follow. But however blown the intros, however strained the comparisons, it is the music that matters amongst the Plophouse logs: a rendering of fire and air, of Salamander signs that play behind the eyes, a Rosicrucian's sack of liquid gold oozing past all knowing into all-knowing. Join in, friends, cast your ears asunder. Groundhogs in milk. Upcoming journeys of spirit and flesh, of the path burned over the road and through the corn, perchance to beckon forth from these ridges and hollers, perhaps to prompt a still-deeper burrowing, an early warning, with probably more to follow: and that, that of note is more than enough, is it not, "pursuing ... like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain." Two upcoming sunset ragas: pluck-and-saw, dewdrop-through-the-bean-sprouts take on sounds traditional and less so, recordings of fields and the six strings that drew mud. Unfurl the great moth wings that flap everlasting in the houses of the moon; the yowl begins. A long evening of sounds improvised and installed, a ritual commemoration of Cinco de Mayo and more nebulous creation myths, alternating performance and standing tones, and the states of waking and super-waking, which is often mistaken for sleep; the subtle workings of subjective science. Programs may be provided. "The old ones inside us, the collective consciousness, the many lives, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television." An exposition of plucked, sawn, stirred and otherwise summoned sound, beamed-from-beyond meditations, a mission to lift the infinite veil. Rumor of fiddle. A methodical exploration of the frequency spectrum; this week: 220 Hz. Throughout: Aether transmissions made temporal and pursued by agitated novitiates, hoisting aloft their bottles and crying, "Halt, lightning!" as wiser heads, as always, drink it all in -- fnord.