Hash Jar Tempo

Recorded on March 26, 1995, but not released until two years later, "Well Oiled" is without doubt the masterpiece of the Hash Jar Tempo project, launched by New Zealander Roy Montgomery (one of the greatest musicians of recent decades) together with Bardo Pond (the Gibbons brothers on guitars, Clint Takeda on bass, Joe Culver on drums; the only absentee being singer and flautist Isobel Sollenberger).

"Well Oiled" is a monumental work, a hymn to the clarifying power of Music: 78 minutes of ultra-dilated, delirious psychedelia, streaked with kosmische musik and granular, overflowing space-rock of "Wagnerian" intensity. A true "suite", whose only binding agent is, precisely, delirium: its endless reaching toward a catharsis made of a single, all-consuming sound.

The dreamlike flight of "Dark Star" (Grateful Dead) has become eternal, circular. The intermittent hisses and astral frequencies of "Interstellar Overdrive" (Pink Floyd) have taken on a magmatic, tumultuous abrasiveness. More than simple instrumental jams, the pieces on "Well Oiled" are black holes, bent on sucking in the entire psychedelic (and non-psychedelic) universe conceived over roughly thirty years of rock. Here and there surface shreds of mammoth "space rituals" (Gong, Hawkwind, Ash Ra Tempel), splinters of sleepwalking yet dangerously visionary madness (Peter Green), sidereal laments of striking spirituality (Cluster, Klaus Schulze), exasperated and exasperating trances (Velvet Underground + Neu! + Glenn Branca), mantric regurgitations (Popol Vuh) and supersonic pandemonium (Chrome). The "journey" has become definitively "metaphysical": the presence of three electric guitars unleashes an imposing mass of emotions, unconscious buds searching for some possible rationality.

It's all a game of "interplay". Of reckless triangulations. The progressions are usually deafening, laden with apocalyptic, hammering, exhausting drones. But as they unfurl impetuously, the guitars float free and undisturbed, often marking out a terrifying astral hymn in unison. For this reason, though not only this, compared with all the other great psychedelic jams in rock history, "Well Oiled" feels like a genuine "ultima Thule", a ravine that is at once dark and blindingly luminous, possessed of an incredible spiritual force capable of standing at the edge of sonic chaos without being swallowed by it. This is highly dramatic music: its task is to represent that proximity, certainly not to give it a concrete image. The representation stands as transcendence, suspended in a kind of limbo, halfway between dream and reality.

From a "compositional" standpoint, the keyword is "synthesis". Synthesis as an exhausting search for a thin thread capable of standing as the essence of everything that is "psychedelic" (in music and beyond). And, in the end, synthesis as a transcending of the very concept of "psychedelia". Another notable fact is that there are no titles, only durations. Times that do not correspond to ordinary measurements, because they cannot. Because the music seals other pacts: with an eternal presence that sets aside numbers and clock hands, and locks landscapes and people inside a glass bubble, as if on a stage where there are no characters or scripts, only a single, terrifying vision.

Track 1 (13:33) opens with a disjointed drum step, guitar chords and reverberations that grow ever closer, ever warmer. The instruments seem like vessels tossed about by a stormy sea. Against the drums' decelerations, the guitars' napalm chromaticisms come crashing down. At a certain point, Montgomery lets his touch become more recognizable: his exploits are as earthly as they are spatial; the pace is crystalline yet, at the same time, filthy, unhealthy, feverish. Like when, at 5:58, his guitar begins screaming without pause, gripped by the demons of mind and body. One of the highest points. Catastrophe lies within those muffled blows Culver strikes on the cymbals; within the perpendicular, imperceptible scales of Takeda's bass (a dying pulsar inside a storm of maddened asteroids); within those micro-harmonic pollutions the Gibbons brothers scatter over the panting breath of this first, masterful symphony of infinite space. Stream of consciousness for desperate astronauts: forever wandering in the void. Psychedelia.

Track 2 (1:58) sounds like a grieving, furious homage to the best of Peter Green, to his gloomy landscapes, to his misshapen, pagan spirituality, steeped in chemical fumes. The slow, rocking wails that open track 3 (13:05) clear the way for the mind's drowsy gliding. It is a slow ascent toward that all-consuming sound mentioned above: an ascent as difficult as it is solemn, as languid as it is, ultimately, dramatic. A minimal scansion of interwoven feedback, lopsided echoes and harmonics held in apnea. The bleak, menacing hiss of the Void. Hypnotic "cosmic" resonance. Ultimately, a serenade for the farthest stars. Track 4 (11:09), meanwhile, launches into a grandiose, unstoppable tumult of space-rock. Culver is furious, possessed. Dry and precise (even if kept in the background), his drumming holds up the entire framework, even as the Gibbons brothers' atomic detonations and Montgomery's intergalactic solos push this blazing meteor ever deeper, into a shimmering lake of timbres and thoroughly poisonous resonances.

From the depths come the cosmic drones and metallic vibrations that frame the solitary, universal prayer of track 5 (13:51). Blinding darknesses proceed in fragments within a grandiose scenario of imminent apocalypse. Cluster and Jerry Garcia arm in arm through silent, painfully "impassable" valleys. Roy Montgomery on the cliffs of pre-existence like a mute bard. His guitar playing, suspended in the void and steeped in melancholy and resignation (see above all his "Temple IV" and Dadamah's "This Is Not A Dream"), seals an unbreakable pact between melody and noise: the former as a symbol of an arcane peace with the world, the latter as a vivid reflection of inner torment. From this "apparent" clash is born a majestic rise and fall, which follows, within those chords launched toward a tar-black sky, the clearest traces of a millennia-old path. Yet in the final minutes, what was ecstasy just moments before turns into roar, sonic epilepsy, as electronic geysers push the six-string's last gasps into a vortex of dissolving noise.

The otherworldly ballet of track 6 (18:44) blossoms as a soft pulse, one that grows ever more hypnotic and distorted. A pulse as apotheosis of life, bent on generating manifestation upon manifestation of divine glimmers. It is the longest, most obsessive journey. Apparently static, yet worn down by infinitesimal variations that continually expose it to the risk of a "definitive" collapse. Culver's jazzy touch gives the whole piece a swaying gait. This time his contribution is more physical, less subtle and estranging. Alongside him, swept by a sidereal wind, dart the tinkling guitar figures, capable of soaring in a flight so epic and sublime as to summon the grandiose cosmic scenarios of "Irrlicht" (Klaus Schulze).

The delirium is complete, total, scattered across the galaxies like the underground sound of the big bang, amplified by some mad congregation of outcast aliens. It is no longer man who generates it: it is the music that abducts him and hurls him into a bottomless abyss. The guitars are dying. They moan in a bed of rotting flowers. All they can still do is vomit onto one another. The rest is a whisper. The essence they sought, fearlessly (track 7; 6:01).

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30/10/2006