Chas Smith
Nikkowolverine

"You want a chaos, I got chaos..."
We all have a bit of a cliché that identifies a cosmic ambient sound, those rarefied electronic landscapes, where we imagine a hypothetical musician surrounded by keyboards tweaking levels, buttons, and knobs to produce a deep space whistle.

Here, dear Chas Smith, recovering hidden memories from when he was a space-time traveler, wastes no time; he retreats to the Californian desert and, having achieved the right concentration, hence solitude, builds his own instruments that allow him to produce the exact frequency to faithfully recreate the sounds he retrieved from the psyche of eternal returns. Lathe, welder, milling machine, grinder, various carpentry, metals, sheets... and thus the cosmic forge is activated. The result is definitive because it is unique, just as the "musical" instruments are unique pieces that provide a new sonic view for a crystalline journey supporting, equally, the astral one.

A sound that does not try to explain itself, that does not seek recognition, that excludes associations. There is the heavy silence of the sidereal abysses where echoes and vibrations from who knows where make us recognize it. The immensity, the absoluteness, the lack of limits launch us at more than the speed of light to the edges of the Universe and back. Lacerating waves trace courses like a mad comet, where material prisons are definitively abandoned to be pierced by a shower of meteorites.

And things like Cooper Box, Bass Tweed, PezEater, Tio, Adkins, Iockheed, Mantis, DADO, are not curse words in alien dialect but are those time machines that, if we are able to caress them adequately, will send us an infinite message that will make us experience a change of Galaxy. We are immersed in the cosmos, our thoughts change in the sidereal, we can listen to and understand the immobility of the stars, converse with them.

An old pioneer of unusual sounds with the pedal steel guitar, he suits that more eclectic branch of artists of that trance-California scene so dear to me. Founder of Cold Blue Records in the early '80s, he revives it after 15 years of retreat, rebranding it as Cold Blue Music and reemerging in 2000, rarefied in his progression with his creations journeying toward a black hole.

The listening is disorienting because atmospheres arise from things that should not exist, but the concreteness of the project is based precisely on the power of the invisible. Surprising us suspended, an indescribable wave arrives that pervades the whole being, helping it to disappear to merge with Unity.
All the particles are full of this deafening silence. At times it becomes difficult to withstand the impact, but we remain there, addicted to nothingness.

This time the cowboy hat (the one he holds in the album photo while playing the Cooper Box in the middle of the desert) is positive, in contrast to the same hat worn by the "rider" of the H-bomb in "Dr. Strangelove". Let's transport ourselves beyond and try to disintegrate differently...