I credit my (continuing) time at KUCI in college for exposing me to the insane amount of music available in this world. Without it I would be nothing. Upon arriving at the station, I began to slowly ingest CDs and records, without very much rhyme or reason. One of the first CDs that I recall pulling from the experimental section was by a band called Goa. I put it on the CD player and was at first mildly intrigued by the first track, three minutes of nice synthesizer noodling up and down scales atop of washes of more synth, live drums, samples, whatever. Later I would feel this similar to Vision Creation Newsun-era Boredoms, but at the time I wasn’t so apt to make the comparison despite having heard the record.
Then I heard the second track, and I to be honest, I don’t remember what my response was, other than: “I want to hear this song again.” Now, I am at least two or three iTunes libraries and/or hard drives removed from when I originally ripped this CD to my computer, but I have to estimate that I listened to this song hundreds of times in the coming months. My search for information on Goa yielded few results, and the rest of the album, while great, did not have the visceral energy of “Biyah.”
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This song was like nothing I’d really ever heard at the time. The processed gibberish vocals, the minimal synth melody, the unfathomably propulsive rhythm section, and perhaps most of all, the way that the song completely and brokenly raged at full volume out the gate, like an alarm alerting a imminent but not unavoidable nuclear meltdown. It’s unbearably chaotic but control is not out of sight; the rhythm section grounds the other players in a sort of limbo. The pandemonium is slowly but surely being subdued but another potential disaster might be right around the corner.
I’m pretty sure this song built some sort of chamber in my psyche, putting a sound to a thought that had not known how to express itself prior. Today, I listened to the song in the first time in a long while, and I realized almost immediately that both the music I make as part of Moon Pearl and the music I strive to make in general, and furthermore, all the qualities I love the most in music, are exemplified in total by this song. It hit really hard! New sounds, passionate playing, boundless energy, apparent positivity, in a holistic and fully dynamic multi-timbre assault. With lots and lots of repetition.
Last.fm says that this recording/album was made by some folks from Montreal’s Alien8 and associated scene. That makes sense, I think. I guess they have released some more stuff since 2002, I’m gonna buy it immediately.
