Sploosh
A solo trip into town last night to the Liquid Room for The Orb and Ozric Tentacles. I’m not especially keen on the Liquid Room as a venue, but I found a spot in the middle of the ground floor and settled in. I’d seen the Ozrics before but not The Orb.
The Orb did their thing. A lot of happy people melted into the beats and enjoyed it a lot; I was not one of them. The Orb’s thing is not my thing – I prefer melody – but that’s OK. There was one really weird moment, though, when it felt like all of existence was reduced to my senses being pummelled by sound and light. It felt strange and somehow important and not, as you might expect, disorientating; it was nice to have that weird sense of being even if my overwhelming feeling during most of their set was please make it stop!
I escaped to the upstairs level where the sound wasn’t so intense and was amused to see the sound man ignoring what was happening and checking his phone messages. Quite a few people were obviously only there for the Orb because they left before the Ozrics came on. Their loss.
Ozric Tentacles bill themselves as Europe’s premier psychedelic trance band and that is as accurate as it can be. Last time I saw them they were on a double bill with Gong and their music swam in the same pond as Gong; this time, with a slightly different line up and Saskia more prominent, they came on like the unholy lovechild of Gong and the Chemical Brothers. It occurred to me quite early on in their set that they were doing everything that the Orb did but with actual musical instruments, played by people. Dear reader, I have to report that your Cosmic Surfer dad danced a lot.
I had another of those moments during the Ozric’s set, and I promise that I had only had one beer with my supper. This time it was longer-lasting and more affirming, with a greater sense of what Jerry Garcia called the form beyond chaos. It pointed toward something other that I thought I understood at the time but didn’t note down and have now, 12 hours later, quite forgotten. Maybe it will come back to me, maybe it won’t; maybe the memory of the meditative moment happening is sufficient of itself.
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Different drummer and bass player, but here’s the Ozrics last year
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