Liner notes to Eyes In The Back Of My Head
Cosmologic (Cuneiform Records, 2008)
By the time this album comes out, we'll have been together as a band for nearly ten years. Even though we can all point to other longstanding collective groups that have inspired us, they are always the exceptions to the rule. Maybe it's because of how Western music industries work, or something more fundamental to our culture, but one thing is clear: sustaining a long-term, collaborative project is hard work. As if it weren't challenging enough to stay together as a performing ensemble, we also double as a composers collective, creating all of our own music through pieces we write as individuals, then crack open fully through group work. Few bands using this model survive so long, so we're thrilled to be releasing this fourth disc of all original music.
And what we're excited about is more than just having survived this long. Sound and process shape one another in all music making, and in the specific musical histories we draw on, collectivity is an especially important thread. In the open form, improvised, exploratory musics that have exploded in so many directions during the past half century, even the innovations of our most iconic visionaries are grounded in profoundly collaborative communities. Most of us in Cosmologic have other projects as leaders, where our individual ideas can take a more crystallized form, but this band always has a special alchemy that activates something at the core of what improvised music is about. We can't really explain it in words, but we have spent the last decade meticulously inscribing our ongoing friendship into a group sound, and we hope that in each album and each concert, our listeners can hear something of themselves in the traces.