The news of a release by Curtis Godino is always warmly welcomed at OBLADADA. The early work with his band Worthless, is a unique mess of psychedelic, disorientating splendour. After disbanding in 2019, it wasn’t long before his focussed recording and production styles formed a series of dizzyingly, if evermore varied releases.
Albums like, Alien Nation, Corners and Their Places, bellboy//bubblecrunch, and most recently The Midnight Wishers all feel like chewed up, and still hugely overlooked masterpieces. Each album is an exploration of a new approach, a retracing of something familiar, but somehow also an original take on creating rich and heady atmospheres. You quickly sense how many ideas were stuffed into each album, and how much Godino continually challenges himself technically, and creatively. Everything has that contradictory sense it could have been recorded in his bedroom, or a huge studio, in 1972 or yesterday. A very real illusion that everything has been dipped in the headiest sonic treatments and techniques.
It’s clear Godino, as much as a sonic adventurer, is always focussed on learning about sounds, effects, production and recording techniques. How to take ideas, lyrics, melodies, fragments, instrumentation, even the way the music is represented in sleeves and artwork – and turn them into lush and layered, fully realised psychedelic worlds.
Discorporation could be regarded in some ways as the most fully rendered vision of his reality yet, but in true Godino style, it’s never quite as simple as that. The rug he invites you to sprawl out on, is continually pulled from under you. The clue, of course, is in the title. Whilst amusingly some weird venn diagram between disco and corporation, the word more specifically means “to leave one’s physical body, such as through metaphysical or drug-induced means”. (I’d only heard the word once before, when introduced by a certain Frank Zappa). However, one may try to reach this state, by far the easiest and more accessible route in through your imagination.
Discorporation, in the sleeve notes, is broadly presented as the soundtrack to a film that was lost in a fire. The album therefore suggests itself as a headless library record, solely designed to provide the musical ballast to an unknown visual narrative. A collection of functionally titled cues and themes, none of which gives any real sense of what the actual story may have been about.
The sleeve – a record pulled from a dusty archive shelf, emblazoned with a distinctive and memorable black blob form, the likes of which, we haven’t actually ever seen before. It’s a charred wreck, a Rorschach test, an alien glyph, a coffee cup stain, a logo, weirdly, deliberately photoshopped, ambiguous and non-committal, memorable and instantly recognisable, again – a nothing, and a something.
In fact, right away, it’s clear that the whole soundtrack to an imaginary film might just be that. There never was any film but we have 40 minutes of twisted, detailed music that provides any dreamers that may be inclined, a drift through something that outlines the building blocks of a story.
On that basis, quickly we are in the trippy fanfaring of Theme. A squidgy daydream packed with organs, percussion and fluffy clouds of voices. It’s a tumbling procession of keys, strings, all beautiful interlocking, rising and falling into itself. A wide screen welcome into this odd and hallucinatory world.
Theme 1 floats in glassy ripples and Vibraphone Theme 1 does the same as it slowly blossoms into a piano crescendo. By the time Harpsichord starts, the whole thing has swept you up in wave of creative bliss. After a somehow uneasily plodding beat, things break into weird speaker panning smears and crashing drums then footsteps, then a dream of some spaghetti western saloon bar, then back the original theme pecked at by yet more voices, turning into columns of sound, and/or aliens…
In fact, any detailed plotting of what happens in Discorporation quickly feels pointless.
It’s clear, the imaginary film at its heart, despite not actually existing, isn’t a rom-com or a crime thriller. It’s a lounge paced suite echoing an unwieldly list of David Axelrod, King Crimson, Serge Gainsbourg, Pink Floyd, Ennio Morricone, Basil Kirchin and countless other expert nob twiddlers. It’s the ceremony from Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, creepy animations you watch behind the sofa as a kid, off-piste sci fi, ghost stories, creepy forests and misty ruins. A cascade of keys, strings, acoustic spaces and electronic sinews, all beautiful interlocking, rising and falling into itself. Rising swells of beauty, giving way to odd twists and unexpected trapdoors, delirium, light and shade. All unfolding on location – a gently unsettling fairground, swirling lights, masked shadows, and illusions – as the mushroom tea you forgot you’d slipped earlier, starts to melt your mind and vision.
Discoporation is in fact what might be considered as Godino’s most technically dazzling work so far.
A suite of immaculacy constructed elements. Conceptualised, composed, scored, played and ultimately realised in a way that has clearly taken huge chunks of graft to achieve. Every detail has been considered, no short cuts taken and what you end up with does, without much effort on the listeners part, exactly what the title suggests.
In fact, the day before its official release, Godino will realise the whole album live at The Frist Art Gallery in Nashville. A performance in the city he currently calls home, where he is accompanied by an ensemble including strings, flute and vibraphone, and various projections and lights. Further proof the whole project is a meticulously planned reality, as much as it’s a creative fireball.
In a world that’s bogged down with so many things Discoporation refreshingly invites you to tap directly into your own imagination. Whatever these 20 tracks suggest, those series of random and unrelated thoughts all form into a something. The tetris blocks of a story that form as you waft through this music, channelled into a beginning, a middle and an end, no matter how earth-based, or nonsensical, is somehow always absolutely right.
An incomplete story, shards scrambled, devoid of plot, or characters, presented with only the vaguest sense of its possible existence, only suggestive instrumental music that you, the listener, makes complete.
Discorporation is released on Feeding Tube Records, available here and here
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