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The floating world >> Spiritualized's Jason Pierce has a transcendental path by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
You'd think that with an album title like Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, England's Spiritualized would be first in line to pick up the torch that Denver dropped. But as frontman Jason Pierce explains, that would be a misinterpretation of the band's vibe. "Can't say it's been big on my agenda, going into space. The "space" in the title of the album is just empirical fact, like planet Earth is floating in space, not us as individuals." When you think about it, the human fascination with space travel, from Jules Verne through the B-movies of the '50s right up to Hawkwind and Starship Troopers, has little to do with actually suiting up for zero grav. What it is is a sublimation of our need to leave our bodies, transcending the limitations of these mundane, painful sacks of meat and water we call our physical selves. As far as Pierce is concerned, music is one of the most effective ways of achieving this end. "Think about the lengths that people will go to just to continue to have music," he says. "Take Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time,' which he wrote in a concentration camp during the Second World War. He wrote the piece for the available instruments there, which happened to be a flute, a piano, a cello and maybe a viola or something. He wrote this most amazing piece in a concentration camp, when most people would be thinking of giving up." Freedom can be won through religious ecstasy, the trance state, or even drugs, keys to fooling our own minds into believing that we've escaped the awkward boundaries of time and space. All are themes that can be found in Pierce's work, be it with Spiritualized or with his original band Spacemen 3, a pivotal if underacknowledged force in the U.K. in the '80s. "It's more about music moving you in that way," he explains, "than about it being a diary service. It's true that certain pieces can remind you of when you were fourteen, or when you met such and such a person. They're almost locked in the time they were recorded. But there's also timeless pieces of music, everything from Stravinsky--which does not remind me of the 1920s--to Hendrix, likewise the '60s, that continue to move the human spirit." Since it's the spiritual, not the spatial, that preoccupies Pierce, it makes sense to hear elements of American blues and gospel weaved into the washed-out sheets of narcotic guitar noise and hypnotic synths that make up the Spiritualized sound. Pierce feels that the religious rush of gospel can be enjoyed vicariously by the less-than-faithful, and that a comparison can be drawn between blues and the most esoteric of primal trance rhythms. "I think that trance thing, that repetition, is present in everything from 12-bar blues to rock 'n' roll to whatever," he says. "The blues is cyclical, it's systems music." Truth is, you'll find a lot of seemingly incongruous elements in the music of Spiritualized. Noted avant-garde string unit the Balancescu Quartet rub shoulders with noted après-midnight voodoo bluesman Dr. John on Ladies and Gentlemen, thrown in with strings and brass, free jazz and heavenly chorales. What resulted was a warm and fuzzy sonic soup that makes perfect sense... if you've been raiding your parents medicine cabinet. Oddly enough, drugs are now the least of Pierce's interests. Odd because Spacemen 3 once released a record called Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs By, and when Ladies And Gentlemen first hit stores it was packaged for pharmacy shelves, not record racks. The disc came stuffed in a foil blisterpack, complete with dosage and doctor's warning. "It wasn't difficult to do, the only thing was they were all handmade, in an actual pharmaceuticals factory. So the people who made our records looked like members of Devo or something, wearing safety glasses and rubber gloves." Still, Pierce states that "if you need drugs to enjoy a certain piece of music, there's probably something wrong with the music." When he gets high for a show these days, he quite literally gets high. "We did the highest show on Earth, in Canada. We played the top of the CN Tower. I just wanted to be billed as the highest show, but somebody in Norway got hold of our idea and wants us to do the highest planetary show, so he's booked an island north of Norway, about 500 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. We're going to do that later on this year, with the Northern Lights as a backdrop." Pierce may have no intention of leaving Earth's atmosphere, but both physically and musically, he's come far closer to space than John Denver ever did. Spiritualized open for Radiohead at the Molson Center, Monday, April 13th. Sold out
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A while back, beloved American singer/songwriter John Denver was making noise about how, before he died, he intended to board a space shuttle and do the very first concert in space. Then he went and did just that... died, I mean.