9:30 INTERVIEW: The Comet Is Coming
In a world of unobservable measures both physical and beyond, it can be the artist's job to fill in our blind spots. By picking up Sun Ra's spiritual torch, BADBADNOTGOOD's swagger, and Three Trapped Tigers’ ferocity, London-based psychedelic jazz trio The Comet Is Coming are the latest to do so and free us from our caverns with the brilliant Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery, out March 15 on Impulse! Records. We lucked out in getting some rare insight from the forward thinkers themselves - King Shabaka, Danalogue, and Betamax - ahead of their 9:30 presents show next week.
9:30 Club: What drew you to Impulse! Records? Why is it a good fit for the next phase of your musical manifesto?
King Shabaka: The first stage of squatting the master’s house involves walking through the front door.
In the past, you’ve described your songs as being snapshots that create a particular phrase or mantra when put together in the format of an album. Do you still consider this to be true? If so, what is the message you are sending with Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery?
Danalogue: Sometimes I wonder where are we pulling this music from? The myriad spectrums of our imagination in the moment, the thoughts and emotions that are arising for us individually, the places we can go in our subconscious, alternate dimensions and then the chemical reaction that occurs between the three of us when playing simultaneously. And there’s more. In that way a Comet Is Coming album is a series of vignettes of parallel realities or dream states woven together.
While you could consider the album to deal with notions of past and future, death and rebirth, destruction and creation, cultural reflection and an encouragement for the will and imagination, the possibilities are endless and what this record means will ultimately be in the mind of the listener.
In the end there are thought patterns and clouds of inspiration that occur in our lives generally, and that will implicitly be involved in the art we make, which can sometimes bleed into the explicit.
The titles in particular [on] the album title contain further encoded symbology.
The upcoming album dives into the coexisting planes of being and consciousness. Referring to the term “Lifeforce” - is this a concept of some higher being that encompasses what’s referenced in your subject matter, or is this something that you see as all that is and isn’t?
King Shabaka: Questioning has to start with an exploration into the nature of the ‘deep mystery’. I see this mystery as being the interconnectivity of all things, the point at which the plane of consciousness which we inhabit singularly is shared by many in service of elevation/elation. The mystery encapsulates all perspectives and narratives depicting the past, binding them into an ever revolving door to the present which stays in perpetual motion. The mystery has a lifeforce - it grows, it adapts to our ongoing human experience in a continual nuancing of its purpose and form with an equal force to whatever dynamism our endeavours to understand it and depict it unleash. This lifeforce can be accessed through the creation of energy. The energy of meditation, the energy of breathing, the energy of the sexual encounter, the energy of music. This lifeforce is a bridge to the deep mystery.
In past interviews, you’ve mentioned following and finding inspiration from Alan Watts’ teachings, which commonly focus on the self and the implications of having a human experience. Since you label your music as “pre-apocalyptic,” what do you think the reality of the self versus a collective consciousness would be like in the end of the world?
Danalogue: This is something I frequently talk to taxi drivers about after they find out the name of the group.
If we use Watts’ classic analogy of life being like a wave, that needs to rise to a crest and eventually crash down to make the whole wave, or his question ‘is the candle worth the stick?’ (Do we prefer to have this wonderful fire flickering, lighting and dancing even though it eventually burns out and disappears) it can help to process the precious, fragile and ephemeral nature of our lives on an individual level, and approach Nowness, that everything is in the Now.
In terms of collective consciousness, we can consider how rare a thing it is that organic matter evolves and organises itself to the point that self-awareness on the level of humans has flowered out of the universe. Part of that is The Lifeforce’s propensity for survival and reproduction, which macrocosmically, as a collective consciousness, can express itself through a sort of horror regarding apocalypse, or the sun eventually cooling and humans dying out. Perhaps humans can rise out of the culturally constructed divisions and environmental destruction that currently hinders our progress towards being able to leave the planet and find new worlds. Perhaps we can transcend this reality and find peace in not leaving the planet and destroying ourselves. I tend to find the former more exciting.
The band has knowledge on the physical (quite literally, quantum physics) and the metaphysical. How does combining the two help you translate this into a synesthetic experience, between music and the visuals in your videos?
Betamax: The duality of physical and metaphysical is really just a game to trick you into seeing the world through different types [of] abstraction. The essence of our truth is an expression in the language of pattern. The correlation of ideas, shapes and events. Reverberation and Collisions, understanding the universal energy through direct experience. Awareness itself actually takes the form of the world. We experience life inside a dream, and in this sense art can be seen as a dream sculpture, made harnessing the primal energy of the universe - creativity. The process of interacting directly with the state of being by manifesting the cosmic intuition. In this way we find meaning and truth and we can say we know, we love, we transcend, we surrender into unity.
Channel The Spirits has “Lightyears” and Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery has “Blood of the Past,” both of which are extraordinary centerpieces to their respective albums featuring rare vocals by guest artists. How did these collaborations come about?
Danalogue: I love use of words as a sudden and fleeting paradigm shift on our records, leaving the bulk of the expression to be encoded into instrumental exploration, but allowing a wordsmith of similar intensity to us to come in and express themselves using our compositions as fuel for their inspiration.
Shabaka suggested inviting Joshua Idehen to the studio, I think they knew each other already, and immediately his fire, energy and excitement to be in the studio made him mesh with the band. He came in, spoke over about five tracks and we picked the ones to keep in production.
I was dreaming of working with Kate Tempest for a long time, and we had a working title of ‘Tempest’ for Blood of the Past, every time we worked on the middle section I’d say ‘this is where Kate Tempest is going to speak’ because I thought she would slay it so hard...so I was monumentally chuffed when she agreed to do it and created such an honest, poignant dissection/destruction mic drop, stars aligned for sure.
9:30 presents The Comet Is Coming at U Street Music Hall on March 21.
