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Everything and Nothing I'll set the scene for you, since being human means living in 3D space
and linear time: Nighttime upon a great urban grid of streets, the
perpendicular crossing of two of them, a boxy gray building, a small
cubic room inside. Angles atop angles, boxes inside boxes, a Chinese
puzzle. Outside it¹s refreshingly cool, and the April moon is bright as
the streetlights. Inside it's sultry as a sauna, with the band taking
up half the room to play and three dozen friends crammed into the other
half to hear, no, to experience, be a part of, this live recording,
this sweat lodge serenade.
And what a serenade — music as opposed to its linear surroundings as the beating heart is to the cages of science. The first set tore a new riverbed through the hard rock landscape and the second set let the river roar. Every time I hear Chemystry Set I feel like I'm hearing it for the first time: musicianship tight as an atom, music wild and roaming as the imagination of the unknown. It's like everything and nothing I've ever heard, a screaming reminder that rock is rebellion and must be reinvented each time it's played, or else it's just pop. I'm thinking of "The Last Real Experience" as I write that, but I could mean any of the songs on this CD. "Tiger on a Roll," for instance, where prog rock meets the new age in an eco-power-ballad that sounds like all ballads and none of them at the same time. But you can hear all this for yourself. What I wanted to say was this: At one
point during the serenade I looked over at the recording system in the
corner, a tower of blinking amps and mixers and a futuristic iMac with
sound moving across its display in orange bars as though pumped in
right from the stage, sound re-conceived as light and movement, and in
a flash I knew what I was experiencing: that the oxymoron live
recording expresses something both contradictory and essential about us
and about that night, the fantastic, surprising, human realization that
every day is not the same old sunrise/sunset but is absolutely unique,
and that our whole need and struggle is to capture this, because some
moments are worth living forever, if only one could. That's what the
spirit is for. And that's what this "live recording" makes happen.
Impossible as such an endeavor may seem, insubstantial as the spirit
may be, made as it is of nothing. Yet somehow, it's everything. -Randy Lyman Randy is a poet, journalist, author,
activist, Mac addict, history buff, dreamer, gardener, and book lover,
with other identities as the need arises. He wishes he could keep God
lost and shuffled amidst his papers, because he's never so certain of
something's existence as when he's searching for it on his desk. |