A Rainbow in Curved Air

It was never supposed to happen. No one was supposed to reimagine Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air - a piece of music that, until now, has existed in its own class of expression. No one was supposed to scale the perilous heights of the citadel and come back with another document of the strange festival scenes within. With the release of Nico Georis’ A Rainbow In Curved Air it’s clear now that this piece of music is a place that you can go to, a kind of astral sanctum that can be visited again and again so long as you know the mysterious paths that lead to it. Doing away with the production tricks used on Riley’s original recording (just intonation, mirror image delay, half-speed tracking of all lead parts) Nico Georis confronts the central seven time theme with a new transparency that gradually complexifies into astonishing Persian carpet displays of patterned musical awareness. This is music of the plenum and not the void: it is teeming with forms that behave in ways that recall descriptions of elaborately jeweled DMT hyperspace; sonic shapes that are driven by the pure uplift and force of infinite, unconstrained autotransformation. In this way it is similar to the original but the pace is way less manic, way more listenable as it rides forward on a calm surge of dazzling zero point energy. The three other songs on the record are Georis originals. Vapor is a moment of twilight abstraction, a plant music duet that features Nico playing along with the plaintive washes of sound produced by a cannabis plant connected to a Plant Wave device. This song was composed spontaneously as it was broadcast live over Nico’s Big Sur based pirate channel, Milky Way Radio. Side B contains two remarkable songs, Hot Slots and 777, that are built mostly out of samples of slot machine sounds. They are both lush holograms of hallucinated beauty and convey something about the spirit of luck, abundance and possibility. This is music for feast days that celebrate the creative selection and birth of new realities. We are just beginning to remember how full music can be, how freighted with spirit forms and attention. We are just now becoming civilized enough for the ecstasy of this music. Now that our species has had enough time to experience this kind of fullness we are perched on the edge of this realization: There has only ever been one song. Occasionally, with adequate preparation and clarity of vision, a musician can usher their consciousness, shamanic, into communion with the living texture of this song. If they survive (it can be dangerous!) and if they have the presence of mind to push the record button at the beginning of their journey then they may return with something remarkable, an account of what they experienced in that other place. Music like a kind of phosphene twilight language autotransforming in the dark, songs written in rainbow black fire on white fire, an inaudible flapping of wings. This is one of those rare documents. Forbidden yet welcoming it spins before you with the uncanny familiarity of a stranger smiling at you in a crowd. Drop the needle and enter again into the spiral stream of giddy, tessellated sensations. It is waiting for you here, prepared to transform you. Now listen. - Matt Baldwin