Gnod
Chapel Perilous

The GNOD (who are practically releasing album after album, each better than the last) are redefining the standards of the psychedelic genre for the new decade. That is, the next one. While Fuzz Club Records continues to extend its dominance over the old continent in terms of neo-psychedelic music, offering ever more appealing releases and partly abandoning the post-industrial drift that characterizes experiences like Radar Men From The Moon or 10,000 Russos, Paddy Shine's GNOD are going their own way. After "Infinity Machines," "Mirrors," the provocative "Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine," and the essential collaboration with RMFTM in the subliminal form of Temple ov BBV, they make their comeback with a new LP entitled "Chapel Perilous," released by the adventurous and epic Rocket Recordings last May 4.

Having gathered a crew of wild madmen (including the Italian electronic music terrorist Toni Cutrone aka Mai Mai Mai), GNOD convened at Bob de Wit's furnace (again RMFTM) in the Supernova Studio in Eindhoven (the new "mecca" of European psychedelia following Liverpool) where they once again worked on an album with strong social and philosophical content, in an alchemical combination of post-humanism, enlightenment science fiction, and conspiracy theories. This time, they delve into the work of the libertarian socialist Robert Anton Wilson and a significant piece like "Cosmic Trigger." As a result, this album is built on the boundary of that fine line where the supernatural meets the everyday, and the definition of reality is entrusted exclusively to sensory experiences.

Opened by the monumental "Donovan's Daughters," "Chapel Perilous" (a definition first used in the literary field in an adventurous work by Sir Thomas Malory in 1485) can be considered the culmination of the conceptual work begun by Lou Reed with "Metal Machine Music" and then continued with the new wave and the Suicide of Martin Rev and Alan Vega: those minimalist and avant-garde impulses never dormant in the wildest nature of the human being, here, transcend any intellectual pretension and materialize in a primitive state where the subject ventures beyond every frontier of imagination to madness. To that paranoia of the subject and the individual considered in the context of contemporary Western society.