The sun-flecked climate of the Mediterranean plays host to numerous islands, including Sicily, a place colonised towards the end of the Late Pleistocene, circa 16,000 years ago. Whether they brought music with them may never actually be known for sure, although Epigravettian artefacts surely point to some form of noise inducement. The sharp sound of a drum, maybe used to frighten off a wild animal, developing into a rhythmic trance, as the human tribes surpass their basic needs to develop culture.
Of course, culture can only develop truly with outside influence, and maritime routes swiftly set up by The Romans, would have brought a goods from all over. Markets set up to trade, whilst Sicilian vineyards provide the Dionysian thrills of the grape, forming a maelstrom of evocative smells and sounds, all wrapped up in a late summer hue. The sound of the ships in the harbour provided a melodramatic hush as the waves of the sea lap against their side. Drunken sailors, high on aphrodisiac thrills, chasing a high that can never be caught.
The high. An illusive naturist form of subconscious hedonism. Illusive, yet pandering obscenely to those who attempt to reach it. The easiest path through drugs, both natural and man-made, but a more informed path awaits through music. Both a channel, and a tool to reach it, music, particularly of a psychedelic nature triggers synapses within the brain, sparking something primordial that those Epigravettian’s would surely have felt within the rhythms and the sparking fires.
Whether Gioele Valenti can trace his ancestry back to those original colonisers is more than likely lost to the past, but what does still exist is that constant need and urge to explore, and lay down new worlds. In Valenti’s case, this is in creating worlds of music that as they develop, form hallucinogenic highs, built from incessant tribal rhythms, and exploratory melodies. Intense, yet beautifully sparked by keen sense of life itself, it seeks the “high” through a probing, questioning style of music. Never staying in place for too long, and forming ululating passages of sense and feeling, transpired from the delicate use of musical instruments.
Valenti fuses his talent with a number of different musicians, going under various monikers. Perhaps more known for his work with the rather splendid Lay Llamas, it is through Juju that we get what feels like the real person. The one constantly looking to package the aforementioned elusive high in a way that both challenges, and accepts. Immediately resonant due to its pulses torn straight from an ancient memory of cultural development, it also seeks to push your mind into new channels of discovery, by introducing new forms of music that you may not have expected.
Apocalypse Is God’s Spoiler is the latest album from the multi-instrumentalist, and may very well be the most fully formed. Dense, layered, yet open to accepting ears, it’s Popol Vuh for a new generation, where the alien and often tribal sounds invade upon 21st century urban malaise. It offers an escape from the everyday toils of simply getting up and getting on with life, by inviting you down a rabbit hole of ancient wonder, stirred up in a psychedelic stew. This isn’t “psych” in the form of playful inventiveness, or cheap droning imitations of space, but rather one that tears at the very residue of your mind to expose those ancient primordial feelings. Those initial, basic needs for fulfilment of a form of spirituality via music created to keep those monsters away from the camp fire. The Mediterranean never had it so vividly exposed as it does here, as Valenti sweeps you from those rocking boats in the bay, to the epicentre of the sparking fire, free from inhibitions.
