Craig Leon - Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon '2019

Tracks list

Like a rare comet, Suicide and Talking Heads producer Craig Leon returns nearly
40 years after his ‘Nommos’ and ‘Visiting’ LPs with
their widescreen conceptual follow-up; ‘Anthology of Interplanetary Folk
Music Vol.2: The Canon’. Apparently John Malkovich makes an appearance
too...

Comprising all new material recorded over the past 2 years, and made using
similar technology and tekkers as his ‘80s classics, Leon’s sequel
finds him riff deeper on the cosmic lore of Mali’s Dogon tribe of Mali,
whose exhibition of art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1973 first inspired him to
make ‘Nommos’; a visionary piece of NYC’s new wave/downtown
puzzle released by John Fahey’s Takoma, which has re-emerged among the
most crucial, revelatory reissues of this decade via everywhere from Volcanic
Tongue to Superior Viaduct, and RVNG Intl’s deluxe ‘Anthology of
Interplanetary Folk Music Vol.2’.

The ‘Nommos’ Leon refers to are part of the Dogon tribe’s
creation myth revolving visitations by an amphibious alien race from the white
dwarf Sirius B who came to impart their wisdom on humankind. Resonating with
then prevailing new age thought and conceptually pre-echoing Rashad
Becker’s ‘Traditional Music For Notional Species’, the
project sincerely speaks to electronic music’s ideals of transcendence,
both (meta)physical and spiritual, beautifully employing the use of synthesis as
a means of divination and hyperstition,

‘The Canon’ leads directly on from ‘Nommos’ and
‘Visitation’, tracing the alien
knowledge/arithmetic/energy’s journey from Mali to Egypt and Greece in a
narrative arc that unfolds like a map for inner exploration, coursing from the
ceremonial chorale of ‘The Earliest Trace’ thru glyphic drum
communications in ‘The Respondent in Dispute’, and the panoramic
beauty of ‘Four Floods of the Point’, before opening the
tantalising wormhole of ‘The Gates Made Plain’, and atomically
diffusing into ether with ‘Departure’.

Including contributions from folk sorceress Cassell Webb and apparently even
John Malkovich in there, somewhere, the results are worth the wait for any
believers who look for signs in the skies.

Tracklist:
01. Craig Leon - The Earliest Trace (2:57)
02. Craig Leon - Standing Crosswise in the Square (6:10)
03. Craig Leon - The Respondent in Dispute (7:29)
04. Craig Leon - Four Floods of the Point (5:40)
05. Craig Leon - The Twenty Second Step as Well as the Tenth (5:05)
06. Craig Leon - The Gates Made Plain (7:27)
07. Craig Leon - Departure (6:00)

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