The experience of listening to GA’AN is something like the imagined experience of hearing a new language being born, one yearning to communicate ancient truths through modern forms, all the while unencumbered by the bondage of a defined narrative.
The experience of listening to Ga’an is something like watching a foreign film through an oddly cracked mirror, where subtitles are not offered and yet, somehow, are not necessary.
The experience of listening to Ga’an is something like if a bunch of wackos from the Midwest slowed down their Bauhaus records to 17.5 RPMs before wielding them to a shrine built out of Tangerine Dream bootlegs, and eventually blasting light-speed through a Voivod-timewarp before recording the first note. I’m talking a mystic, technology killing, “Piper at the Gates of Dawnrazor” trip.
Download “Vulture of the Horn” by GA’AN
Listen: The previous “Band of the Week” entry was a bit of a punt, given that the band in question had shuffled from this mortal coil. That didn’t stop the re-animated corpse from sending a “cease and desist” nasty-gram, leaving the Revolt of the Apes somewhere between eye-rolling and uncharacteristically discouraged.
Nuts to that. Let’s keep sharing sounds.
I first heard Ga’an maybe a year and a half ago, jerking the curtain at a bizarrely wonderful show occurring at a sushi restaurant here in Richmond, Virginia (other bands that night: La Otracina and Keelhaul). The stunning impression they made has withstood the test of time (as has the t-shirt I picked up on the cheap, printed inside-out on an old, blue First Fidelity Bank-branded number). I was excited when I heard that they had released a debut album. I was more excited when I heard the debut album. Let us pray: Ga’an is good.
“I need not add that freedom is a dangerous thing. But it is hardly possible that we are all cowards.”
– John Whiteside Parsons
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