Garan, Santa Sofia, RIP Mama Bruno

Garan by Cookie Snake

I toured Italy with the violist from a band called Rachel’s. He put together “FW”, a four-piece: viola, bass, drums, and a scratch DJ. (Dominic Johnson, Jason Wood, and DJ Pablo.) One show was in the southern, Calabrian mountain town of Santa Sofia D'epiro. Music there curved predominantly Rastafarian. The promoter put us in a marble floor home overlooking the tightly rolled, spliff-filtered, stained glass canopy of the Sila plateau. His family’s restaurant cooked gnocchi, and at dusk he lead us through Santa Sofia‘s main street to the amphitheater like the Pied Piper, signaling everyone to follow. En route, there were espressos, and the mountain air gnawed fresco faces into ganglia and skin. We arrived at the club satiated and arranged. The town was there and out. Old, young, molded, unmolded. Every window open. Every scent binary and sent. Nuns were there and dancing. A hallucinated beetle-monster the size of a schoolbus with mollusk, whale teeth rose out of hillside shrubs and consumed the scene. In its jaws, it aerated, animated, and saw its own life. Someone in the audience pressed record on a portable recording device, and we began to play the song above. (Dedicated to Mama Bruno, who taught me Italian, Italian soap operas, and life. RIP.)

Vodyanoi (mp3)

Vodyanoi by Cookie Snake

Guitar: Gabriel. Bass: Stanfield. Drums: Trent. From The Well Studio.

Vodyanoi – Mechanical Iguana Years. A mute vehicle leans velocity. Condor circles deciphered. Vodyanoi now has ears. Ingestion connects upon you.

On the 17th story, a perch emerges above the girders. A place that wasn’t meant to be. A place where nothing goes that doesn’t crawl or fly. Stairs to, filed down by leaf rot, claws, and gnawing jaws. From the ledge the wet city reveals itself in cement skin. Halogen clouds brush and shove from your feet, moving to voices below. You sit, severed, surveying. Tonight you see electromagnetically. You can see heat. Scores of human forms, reddish orange. Animals, ovens. Furnaces and engines. Higher heat glows white. Hearts a yellow. You see outlines scampering themselves to sleep in digital dens. You hear wolves howling hollow in the hills. There are others out there that long.