Chant To Mother Earth. Blo. 1983. EMI.

 Psychedelia dramatized the practice of late twentieth century self-introspection. Its music, when accompanied by the use of psychotropic drugs, intensifies, shapes, and colors mental processes randomly, resulting in a waking dream experience that’s akin to an auxiliary reality; the virtual, hallucinatory externalization of one’s subconscious mind. This brief respite from sanity, the trip in which one does not differentiate between arrival and departure—an Odyssey without Odysseus—contains the seedling of risk of never properly recovering from the self-inflicted brain damage. In 1972, following the disbandment of Salt, the short lived Ginger Baker-led band project formed shortly upon his move to Nigeria, that group’s core trio of instrumentalists—Berkeley Jones, guitar, Laolu Akintobi, drums, and Mike Odomosu, bass—formed the acronymously named Blo. From its debut record, Chapter One, released in 1973, Chant To Mother Earth is about the religious experience of paring the human will to its inchoate essence in order to transcend consciousness and relinquish dominion over the natural world. Yet if, as we’re told, our only guaranteed path to enlightenment is by way of a comprehensive detachment of self, then there may be no more obtrusive a categorical retardant to salvation than the electric guitar solo. What began, in the hands of certain masters—Robert Johnson, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt—as an artistic signature later became an emblematic expression of the will itself, the existential alarm sounded by Elmore James when he gave iconic, musical form to the plaintive grievance, “I believe my time ain’t long.” Struggling to free itself from the bonds of human speech, the will found itself nailed by musical notes to a fretboard that only gives it temporary flight when maneuvered by human virtuosity. Berkeley Jones, Blo’s guitarist, locates the tension between our struggle for independence from consciousness and the elusiveness of transcendence in a Carlos Santana influenced solo that elides the two natures, humanity’s and the world’s, by stylizing the sensuality out of a slowed funk tempo. Early in Santana’s career, the band made a name for itself amplifying and quickening the sexual pulse of the psychedelic imagination, as did many of the jazz fusionists. Where many of the fusion artists went wrong was in eschewing their aggressive instincts in favor of a radio-friendly technical virtuosity  that led directly to the market commercialization of soft jazz. When deep, inner space psychedelia can be distilled and commodified as the pretentious, sentimental runoff of hard won experience, then the country, having drugged itself into the death match of consumerism, has modified its current drug of choice in response to the market triumph of anodyne overload. William Burroughs is our prophet.


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