Bardo Pond

“‘Bardo’ comes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and ‘pond’ just sounded cool in conjunction with the other word. Bardo is the point where a soul arrives upon its corporal body as it is dying. During the course of the Bardo there is a determination as to where the soul will then proceed to, based upon the soul’s prior life experiences. This moment and place was determined to be a good place for fishing, hence ‘pond’ was added to the name”.

"Bufo alvarius" is a journey. A voyage through the universe the way it was done at the height of the psychedelic and space rock wave. A return to explorations of territories beyond the normal doors of perception. A work that brands the 90s as a new decade defined, strongly and not exclusively, by cosmic wanderings too. Spatio-temporal expansions that scatter an immaterial body into stardust, dangerously close to the pull of a black hole. Matter breaking away from itself, drifting while waiting to find a definite direction to head toward. A trip that moves in spirals between electric storms and vast, quiet spaces.

Bardo Pond formed in Philadelphia in the early 90s from the meeting of guitarist brothers the Gibbsons, bassist Clint Takeda, drummer Joe Culver and singer/flautist Isobel Sollenberger. After a few years of self-releases and supporting gigs, Drunken Fish decided to take them under its wing.

"Bufo alvarius" is their first album for the US label. The title takes its name from a toad found in the Sonoran Desert (spanning the US and Mexico) that secretes hallucinogenic substances from glands on its back. This cult of psychotropic substances already fully reveals Bardo Pond's source of inspiration, linking it directly to sixties culture and the influence of music and drugs on sensory perception. It's not an isolated tribute across their body of work: other substances would crop up in album titles, just think of the later "Amanita".

"Amen 29:15" is simply the title of the closing track along with its running time. A flow that's harmonic and dis-harmonic at once, melodic and dissonant, coiling into spiral lines. A vortex leading straight into the deepest space, leaving a body dazed and almost immaterial, floating amid clouds of feedback ready to fold in on themselves, dragging along everything they encounter. A structure that wanders through thick, magmatic swirls yet becomes a cycle that inexorably returns to the same point, always pulling you back into the eye of the storm. A chaotic, cacophonous outer shell held up by a perfectly harmonious and musical scaffolding. A dichotomy between noise and melody. A single entity from which no element can be extracted without undoing the effect produced by its combination with the other. The result borrows from the noise melodies of My Bloody Valentine and the noise-trance of Spacemen 3, but replaces the former's "pop" undertow with a hard psychedelia, and the latter's reiterations of a few notes with more complex and articulated cyclical repetitions.

"Adhesive", the opening track, already lays out all the typical elements of Bardo Pond's sound. A hint of echoing vocal harmonies is instantly silenced by the entrance of the guitars: one wave drenched in feedback wraps around the whole atmosphere, while the other sketches a melody in delay. They're two instruments free to wander into infinite spaces, yet they inexorably always return to the same point. A circularity typical of Roy Montgomery's guitar playing, which always leaves a gap before closing completely and blurs the motion into a spiral of distortion. Over all this, Culver's drums and Takeda's bass act as markers underlining the melody: they stress its trajectory heavily so it doesn't get lost in the cosmic-drone wind. That's where the whole magic balance of their sound lies.

"On A Side Street" and "Capillary River" follow the same path. The former opens with a sweet, liquid harmony, lashed by currents of droning interference. The drumming turns kinetic and powerful, almost sucked into the flow set off by the Gibbson brothers. "Capillary River" is a grandiloquent cacophony. A repeated, ultra-distorted chord coils around a guitar line attempting to sketch out a noisy melody. A build-up of energy that explodes into noise worthy of the most free-form Sonic Youth, yet never manages to overpower the song's psychedelic undertow.

"Absence" bears out the New York band's influence even more. Sollenberger's vocals edge close to Kim Gordon's territory, just as the interplay between the two guitars can't help but recall the Moore-Ranaldo partnership. But the greater presence, as the title suggests, is that of absence itself: a bare noise, left adrift in cosmic emptiness.

The swarm of loops carries "Vent" into a whirlpool of white noise: a confusion capable of producing transcendental ecstasy through sheer din. Disturbances deliberately caused by voices overlapping on occupied channels, breaking sound down into dense matter.

The album also features warped blues moments. On "Back Porch", Isobel Sollenberger's muffled voice moves between liquid guitars and reverb-soaked fragments. "No Time To Waste" is a crooked blues, made of stops and restarts in which the vocal duet lies buried beneath swaying, filthy riffs.

The bells ring out in celebration. The moment has arrived. "Amen" is the definitive fulfillment, Bardo Pond's hallucinated Alleluia! Chiming bells intertwined with impossibly heavy chords. A bass rumbling majestically through the silence. Guitars echoing free and arrhythmic, with no apparent logic. Siren voices calling from afar to the navigator of the stars, inviting him to lose himself with them for good. An eternal flow that could stretch on forever but stops after 29 minutes. A mystical sound, nearly as sacred as Popol Vuh's "Hosianna Mantra". A liquidity that pervades the entire surrounding space and dissolves its contours like the finest moments of Ash Ra Tempel. It's a suite with undefined, infinite boundaries, imperceptibly expanding with every passing instant.

You could pick apart every single component of “Bufo alvarius, amen 29:15” and dig up its influences. But in doing so you'd lose the whole in a heap of details, losing the chance to simply surrender to the record's sonic flow. Bardo Pond breathe new life into elements drawn from earlier music, reread in a thoroughly modern light: they manage to reinvigorate psychedelia with the insights of noise and shoegaze. The result is a work that feels deeply modern yet possesses a classic, timeless beauty. A way of playing that would prove hugely influential, spawning a vast following within the post-psychedelic scene. The definitive consecration would come with the encounter with Roy Montgomery. The union between the New Zealander and Bardo Pond would in fact give birth to one of rock music's absolute masterpieces: “Well Oiled“, credited to Hash Jar Tempo.

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22/08/2010