The world man… it is loud and it goes fast… digital streaming madness… fuzzy… crazy… non-fucking-stop! You want to get off but something keeps you there… fomo… momentum… scrolling and scrolling… steaming and screaming through the endless succession of sensory overloads… they’re after your money… they’re after your vote… they’re after you… no rest… no sleep ‘til hammered, Smith!

The last few Gnod albums have, to a lesser or greater extent been fine, and I have written enthusiastically about a number of them here… they have been energetic and, to a certain extent, reflective… they have powered through capitalism, the pandemic, the inner mind and always made their voice heard… they have shouted into the void… but there comes a point where the void no longer cuts it…

I started listening to this album about fifteen minutes ago, and all of a sudden I am writing my first ‘album appreciation’ in more than six months… because this album immediately seemed to make it all stop… an instant ‘zoner’. It is the album I have wanted to be put to the Gnod name since ‘Infinity Machines’… but somehow waiting for it has increased its impact.

It is like the ensuing time in between these two releases has been marked by the fucked-up sturm and drang of brain filling shit shows that act as Kafkaesque circuses of the mind… 2014, look what has happened since then… and look where we are now…

Somehow this release has crystallised this for me… by thinking about it terms of Gnod’s previous releases. That’s not to suggest that I have been placing my mental health at the door of Gnod… rather that listening to ‘Spot Land’ has sparked a realisation of the need to just stop… and just be.

It is clear from the blurb on Bandcamp that this is Paddy Shine’s thing… a sort of triangulation of the aforementioned ‘Infinity Machines’, Gnod R ‘n D, and his Moundabout albums… it is an album which immediately takes you out of the everyday and places you somewhere inside your own head… it acts like a sort of cleanser, taking away the accretions that have build up over recent years and, for around forty minutes, lets you dissolve some of them…

I am not denying that there is other music out there that does this, there absolutely is, but because it somehow comes from an oeuvre of wild, fuzzy, in-your-face music that you can lose control of yourself with (especially live); this feels like a very different sort of escape… the sort where you just want to stay in over again… at which point the album has just finished, and this time I am going to listen to it again without the writing…

-o0o-

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