The Cosmic Dead
Rainbowhead

What can I say. Just this morning I was talking to a dear friend of mine who recently lost one of her best friends, who tragically took his own life. Naturally, this tragic event deeply shook her, and she is tormented and unable to somehow find peace or come to terms with it. I clearly tried to talk to her and be somewhat reassuring, and I tried to make her feel better, but, as you can well imagine, it is difficult in such situations to find the right words and not be somewhat in some way always and inevitably banal, too ordinary, or repetitive. Naturally, this is not the place to delve further into what are personal events and facts, and anyway, these, after all, are, let’s say, not of common interest. However, among other things, the reason why she wanted to talk to me was because she felt particularly disturbed, and this is evident, but particularly because she couldn't stop, can't stop questioning and speculating on what the great meanings of life are and consequently of death.

Nothing strange. She is not a stupid girl, and probably, indeed surely, anyone in her place, on such dramatic occasions, would be led to ask themselves the same questions and seek these great answers. These are not unusual questions. Humanity, after all, questions the meaning of life and death and tries to explain these concepts in every possible way since it somehow became aware of itself and developed reasoning abilities. You can be sure of it; we will never stop questioning ourselves on the matter, and this is also because we will never have a definitive answer. There is no definitive answer, indeed, in my opinion, because the only thing we can truly do and that we indeed must truly do is to live our lives to the fullest and in the best way possible according to our purposes and intentions while at the same time considering that we are part of a society made up of people.

In this sense, it is evident, I apply to life some 'cosmic' significance. There is continuity in the history of humanity, and I consider the life of the individual as something that cannot be exhausted in itself. Life is a circle: everything you do and everything you think and feel is not exclusively something you own in a certain sense, thus giving meaning to an identity process in which each of us is somehow part of everyone else.

The poet and writer Ugo Foscolo in some way considered that a sense of life and death could be found around the place that physically corresponds to the tombs. In this sense, he considered the place where the dead were buried as a physical place where, at the same time, to remember the dead and consequently bring them back in some way to life precisely through memory. Obviously, Foscolo was a man of his times, lived between the 1700s and 1800s, and his work must also be contextualized with what were the Napoleonic reforms in this sense and therefore with the historical context of reference, so we certainly cannot define his thought as ‘cosmic’. However, it is undeniable that he also considered life and death as a unicum in some way.

The Cosmic Dead, it is evident, come from another type of culture and from another historical moment, particularly from this historical moment and the present time. One of the most respected bands in the psychedelic genre across the Channel and beyond, these guys defined themselves as a group of space and cosmos navigators through the mind and interpret their music more as a sort of eternal and painful eternal torment, as a sort of balm and transit between those two dimensions we define as life and death.

We could certainly notice concepts in this type of thought derived from a certain typically sixties hippie philosophy, but why not, after all, if we consider that musical genres and forms of thought like psychedelia or kraut-rock, cosmische musik by definition, also have at the center of their imagination a harmonic vision of life. This concerns the coexistence among all people and, at the same time, interaction with everything surrounding us. Here then arises a question about psychedelic music and how at times there can appear to be a stark contrast between this kind of thinking and the imperious, furious, devastating sound of bands like the Cosmic Dead, Mugstar, Radar Men On The Moon, Gnod.

Why then should heavy-psych music present itself as a genre with the ultimate goal of making people live in harmony with each other and with everything around them, and at the same time be something so terrifying, noisy, disturbing, acidic? Well, the explanation, in my opinion, is very simple guys, and with this, I’m not saying I have any truth in my pocket, but I simply limit myself to considering what my personal life experiences are. So, all I think is that when you encounter a change, when we face any phase of change, this passage is something that must necessarily be somehow painful. You cannot change without the thing leaving marks on you, and the mutation, shedding skin, can be something exhausting, and a process during which you can easily encounter what might be turbulences and variations and alterations and precariousness of your mental state. For all these reasons, then, a guide becomes indispensable, a guide could be useful, and who better than a psychonaut at this point could lead us through one of these processes until bringing us back to see the light?

The music of the Cosmic Dead is something seemingly irregular and frenetic. Devoted to space music and kraut-rock and psychedelia, this latest album (‘Rainbowhead’) consists of what are only four tracks that can also be defined as four acts of the same passage. The first, ‘Human Sausage’, is what could be defined as the furious battle of man against his demons, engaging them in a fight that translates into a hypnotic dance like the one danced by two lively battle roosters. The second, ‘Skye Burial’, is an interlude lasting three minutes in which in some way the sound invites us to relax and regain strength before proceeding along the path and before the last two tracks, which consist of a terribly hallucinated heavy-psych experience. Two long noisy sessions, the first of which can be defined as more typically kraut, and the second, the title track ‘Rainbowhead’, which is instead an acid session dominated by the impetuous majesty of the bass sound and the screeching sound of electric guitars.

We are not faced with something that can probably be defined as a masterpiece, and this album probably, indeed certainly, will not change your life, but I don’t think in the end the Cosmic Dead ever intended to do something like that. They do not push for change, but they are psychonauts, and at most, they can guide you through it: they can guide listeners as Virgil did with Dante Alighieri through the treacherous ways of hell. A guide that is both spiritual but also somehow concrete. Something that you can touch with your hand, and how could you otherwise, in front of the mighty walls of sound that rise imperiously in this album.

Dear friend, I don’t know if you will ever read these few lines and it doesn’t matter in the end, because I know that somehow you will find your own way and you will find within yourself if not the answers to these doubts and issues that torment you, at least somehow a way to metabolize all that has happened. Who knows if death is the end of all things and if there is or isn’t an afterlife, what I feel and when I feel such strong music is that I am still alive, and then I say it’s okay like this, and we should not be afraid and have no fear of death or life.