Bardo Pond
Acid Guru Pond

By now it's a tradition. After the popular 'Record Store Trilogy', started in 2013, Bardo Pond, the American psychedelic rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, released a double LP on April 16th via Fire Records. A limited edition of only 1,000 copies and as such destined especially for enthusiasts.

But that's not all. If you're a fan of psychedelic music and you appreciate the drone and esoteric sounds of this band and those typical of the genre, you cannot help but be thrilled to know that this album is practically a 'split'. A true experimentation and an event featuring Bardo Pond collaborating with two special bands, two of the main collectives in psychedelic music experimentation, the Japanese Acid Mothers Temple and the historical krautrock band Guru Guru. A collaboration that practically exponentially increases the acidity and sonic complexity of the compositions contained in this album.

The double LP is divided into six tracks and has a total duration of over an hour. Indeed, to tell the truth, and as is typical of the genre, it is difficult to consider each track ('Purple', 'Green', 'Blue', 'Orange', 'Red') as standalone and as if each could have a complete sense by itself. The complexity of the work leads to the point that it's practically difficult, if not impossible, to understand each one singly and as a standalone part, and dividing the work into several tracks seems more like a real 'editorial' and stylistic choice than one resulting from any artistic rationale.

Following the typical traditions of these bands and what is their legacy, considering we are talking about three of the most influential entities in the psychedelic music scene which have influenced a lot of artists that came after, 'Acid Guru Pond' is practically a long acid session where there is no real introduction and if we may say, not even an end.

According to some, it all would have started with 'Metal Machine Music'. Perhaps the reader knows that the original vinyl version of Lou Reed's fifth album has an ingenious technical trick whereby the last groove of the LP constitutes a continuous loop, making the record play infinitely.

The truth, however, is somewhat different or at least broader. I mean, Bardo Pond started playing in the nineties and since then they have sought through their music to experiment and expand every possible segment of space rock and psychedelic music. I'm not exaggerating when I say that from that moment the band embarked on what would be a true mission which was, however, born, already a long time before they started playing. Long before Bardo Pond, before each single band member was born.

Bardo Pond are explorers of space and time and they travel through it using music. You might even read something like that in the pages of literature authors like Jack London, Aldous Huxley, or William Burroughs. These authors have done the same with their literary work, the same as this band is trying to do and demonstrate with its music. I'm talking about something more than a simple record, obviously. I'm talking about the human being and human nature. I speak of the history of humanity and how this has evolved over the millennia. It would suffice to look at the main source of conceptual inspiration for the band: the Bardo Thodol, what is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The text that describes and also functions as a guide for the experiences that consciousness has after death in what is defined as the 'bardo', the interval between death and rebirth.

All this would have been revealed by the venerable Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century in Tibet and naturally, these thoughts and beliefs, these convictions are part of Tibetan Buddhist thinking. But that's not all, I mean, this is just a small part of the story. This concept, after all, is certainly not something that was first put forward in a more or less recent era like the fourteenth century. There has been a long history before that moment in which human thought evolved in step with the acquisition of new knowledge in the field of various techniques. I don't know if I believe in the 'bardo' or in the possibility of returning to life after death, but I consider all humanity as one single thing. Humanity itself is as if it were a large stone monolith and in which each of us is called to carve a small part of it, what constitutes his or her small part of history in the grand whole.

I believe Bardo Pond does something like that with their music. Actually, they haven't invented anything new and they play the same music that has been played since the beginning of the human genre's history and in doing so, they travel in time and through the past and then into the future. As always, at this point we might ask ourselves one of those recurring questions, like: will there ever be an end to all this? If there is an end, a limit to what will be the life of humanity. Will we all die one day? I don't know, I really don't know, but listening to this record the feeling is that in any case, we still have an infinity of road ahead of us. Let's keep going.