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Mixing it up
The Young Gods bring ancient ideas to contemporary sounds
For The Prague Post November 4th, 2004 According to Franz Treichler, founding member of the Young Gods, the band started out using "sampling, drums and vocals for a very in-your-face sort of sound." That may have been true back in the '80s, with songs such as "Pas Mal." By 1992, however, with tunes like "She Rains" and "Summer Eyes," the Young Gods were moving away from an electrocuted Iggy and the Stooges sound to something akin to Jim Morrison propelled by the electronic possibilities of the '90s. Their broad sweep of effectively executed styles also drew associations with industrial and techno-influenced heavy-metal music. Amid all the noise and decibels, there lurked an increasingly orchestral and poetic intent. In 1997 the Young Gods released the ambient work Heaven Deconstructed, which both referenced and extended the ambient palate with hard-rock sensibility and futuristic evocations. With that disc, the Young Gods adopted a painterly approach to instrumental sound, which Treichler describes as an "instinctive process." "What we are interested in is the sound itself and the textures," he says. "There is a lot of evocative power and suggestion in the sounds, [but] it really depends on how you use them and when. It's a bit like using color. Some colors are going to get brighter, depending on the color you have next to it." The Young Gods continued their ambient explorations in the 2002 EP 5 Dew Points, their 2004 disc Music for Artificial Clouds and their most recent release, Amazonia Ambient Project. The latter was made with their childhood friend Jeremy Narby, who spent much of the '90s deep in the Amazon studying tribal culture and composing his doctoral thesis on what he calls "the knowledge of nature among the people of the Amazon." In the late '90s Narby produced "The Coiled Serpent," his long-awaited study of the Amazonian Ayahuasca culture. More recently he collaborated with Francis Huxley on a 500-year history of shamanism.
Narby and his musical friends found a point of intersection in the trance state, which is induced in civilized society by some forms of techno dance music. In the Amazon, Narby says, "The indigenous people say that they know nature by going into trance states and communicating with it. Trance is at the center of their understanding of nature." At the Young Gods' Amazonia Ambient Project performance in Prague, audiences can expect a program of masterful 21st-century ambient instrumental work combined with sections from Narby's narratives reconciling two distinct ways of seeing things. In the Amazonian point of view, Narby explains, "they see plants and animals as human beings and they see intelligence in nature." By contrast, the developed world's point of view "places humans above nature and views nature as essentially mindless." But it isn't all serious business with Narby, who in gathering botanical and anthropological knowledge also picked up other important lessons. The Amazonian people are also remarkable, he says, "in their humor, in their humility and their capacity to mix things up." It should be quite a mix at this show, too.
Darrell Jonsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com
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