Ides Of Gemini
On Sunday May 4, 2013, the Tao was everywhere of course, untouchable, you can’t touch it whoever you are godlike. Everywhere including the venue Mill City Nights, a former church in downtown Minneapolis. The doom-metal band Ides of Gemini performing like it’s Artaud’s allegory of some cave.
“Prisoners” were chained in the “cave” with escape a hovering halo hearing echoes from the dead-end boys…….girls…….they’re not dead yet. That prisoner audience was not as beardy or witchy or a thousand lives lived as history books would say the next day, the truth books.
With the curtains open, the surface sights an anti-distortion. The band color coordinated with minimalism, not unlike a White Stripes’ indie rock style of black and red. But guitarist J. Bennett’s wearing of a necktie pure psychedelia, distortion, a trip. Vocalist Sera Timms’ bangs vs. her blazing red bass of ironic sonics and the sometimes mallet use of drummer Kelly Johnston, a metal version of Moe (Velvet Underground) Tucker but with a traditionally arranged drum kit oating on a ve pound feather. Speaking in tongues on this side of hell, they all seemed so far apart on that stage………knowing each other’s tarot readings andbringing out imperfect humaneness, possible blasphemy.
Less is more heavy-psych sounds. That makes it easy to pick apart technically and not the point. An esoteric-drone vocal being the point drawn-out to the end, end, framed by the other two musicians in the ritual. The third was the atrophied prisoners being watched – the truth inside their outsides. This is not a revolution in sound combinations because all doom is retro thanks to Black Sabbath. It’s classy, literary, atmospheric, symmetrical primal womb metal that only talks in the dark. The guitar work maintains a slow heartbeat, only seconds here and there of quickness, blood through silver. The drums a modern chariot praying to be gone, over…….over……..The prisoners yearning.
“Silence is a source of great strength.” – Lao Tzu
Before the rst day, god created silence, and that trembling feel ing I had being in the cave with the prisoners, with those riffs, words, uncertainty, paranoia, eventually eeing the cave into an unknown mind forest with an Artaudian confusion burnt around the edges being sad for the future not the past. Some of the audience was there with eyes still open but not looking because we are limited by language.
Escaping the cave, not just being able to leave is a journey, l-i-v-i-n-g or for some, just existing somewhere on a planet and nowhere in particular, the end twice, void, fuck it, maybe a warm place inside the horizon line.
Ideas abstract not the present material things are the most important of the planes of reality like what their own shadows represent for the prisoners inside that fucking cave, and everybody. All they can see are those fucking shadows, mine and yours. Swallow the lightning-bolt pill of enlightenment. In one’s lifetime there are ten heroic paths of your shadow. Take ‘em.
Are the free ones thought about anymore by the prisoners still chained in the cave? The clever one is not the forever-chained one in the cave always ready to die warrior-like that can guess what shadow they will see next, or for the last time, conservative. The want of knowledge, the seeking of experiences, the escaping of the cave and running through the forest to the end light is one of the right ways, the feeling I had as the band played death-like drunk silence. You can’t escape yourself, internal freedom, the heart way. But releasing the prisoners……………. let the Tao.