I can think of many good soundtracks to the following quote, but for some reason this dispatch from C V L T S made me dust off my old copy of Air Guitar, which contains one of the most poignant passages on psychedelic art that I have ever read: “In my own experience,” Dave Hickey observes, “it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table of phenomenal nature until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before — thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing it.” Hickey contends that psychoactive drugs formed the initial gateway between the ‘60 generation and this divide, but that they were later supplanted by psychedelic culture, which tried to reproduce their effects in sight and sound — and eventually settled into recognizable tropes.

Are delay and bending frequencies, consonance and its confusion, doing the same thing with musical language that psychedelics do with words? As a celebration of cassette sound and its mechanical denaturing of what would otherwise be a solid tune, “Corpus Dei” comes a bit late to the game. In fact, one might even say that this warping has become the signature trope of our generation’s own psychedelia. The question can no longer be, then, whether an artist like C V L T S is doing something new; it’s the size of the vista that a song opens up to us, and the melting feeling we get as the foundation shrivels away. Here is one that zaps my own synapses into bliss.

C V L T S, “Corpus Dei” (LVST, AMDISCS )

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