Psychedelic Finland
The music contained here is the sound tracks to a thousand journeys and a million shelters. As we absorb the fragments of our lives in the Digital Empire, we so often lack the sound to step between each momentary space, independent of the machines that control us. The genius of this compilation is in giving us the means to alter total consciousness and vision in city, town, room or field. The music is timeless with jazz folding folk into ritual, raga, soul, chant, wail, steady, noise, groove. Nothing bends twice upon the same step. Loose shanties by lost sailors.
This is space music for those still left loving the Earth. Pulse transmission windows to other worlds. Where tribal acoustics meet 1960s American cult TV themes. Way back where, deep in the forest, we left something behind. With this compilation it now somehow lies just below the surface via the back streets and taiga of Finland. The world promised us is today as primitive as it is cyberspace, breath and wood and gut string as digital and electric. Technologies of sound go so very deep.
There can be little doubt; that which is contained here produces change in the human unit. Beyond the mind there is a universe of possibilities. These sounds are a portal to those states. Traveling around my urban space listening to these bursts of realness, headphones, I felt elated, calm, empty, entranced and even blissful. I remembered things I did not even know I had forgotten. I tasted again the green spaces of freedom and origin.
The jazz mind. To step off from practice into improvisation. To make the unrepeatable, or in other words the impossible. When music began to be written down and ‘musician’ became a profession and no longer a class, the magic left it, as craft mutated into serial production. The scales changed as they are changing again now. Today anyone with a dry space, electricity, a hard drive, screen and motherboard can do it. Magick is now made upon the Bebop skulls of our ancestors.
This is music from a dream city. An auditory passport you use without moving. Suddenly faces fit patterns, your blood seems to be made of warm honey. Beauty is in atoms, light and the fall of a hair across a bare shoulder. Shaded for a time from the long hot dry contemplation of the mind. You can only live with Life for so long. Then blindness sets in and you move according to habit, the dull radar of the day to day. Desires pushed back and feelings left simmering or blunted with the plethora of distractions and anesthetics on offer today. But does anyone really deserve that? I am away from there. Olen vapaa mies!
These tracks are coded properly; the order is maintained after download to portable device and the flow when played is a wild clockwork journey of sound. Careful attention has been paid to the upward rise and plateaus. Forty (40!!!) tracks, passages of sound, aural time. We Have No Zen! have scratched harder and broken open the sheltered world of Finnish/Suomi Freak Noise Folk with this outstanding compilation. It may change your life.
James Barrett (aka Nada Baba)
Stockholm, Sweden October 2012