VA - 1999 - Harmony Of The Spheres 2xCD

Drunken Fish Records – DFR-50  692.25MB FLAC

A reissue is often described as though it were a transparent container: the same music returned to availability in another format. Harmony of the Spheres demonstrates why that description is inadequate. The 1999 double CD contains the same six major works issued in Drunken Fish’s 1996 triple-LP box, but it does not produce the same experience. The original demanded six separate encounters, one artist occupying each vinyl side. The listener lowered the needle, entered a world, reached the runout groove, stood up, turned the record or replaced it, and consciously crossed into another orbit. The double CD removes most of those physical borders. Three sides become one disc, three more become another. What had been six planets now forms two long hemispheres of sound.

This distinction matters because listening architecture changes musical meaning. On vinyl, Bardo Pond’s “Sangh Seriatim” was a complete side and therefore a complete territory. The silence and manual action after it reinforced the sensation that its procession had reached the boundary of its world. On the 1999 CD, the piece ends and Flying Saucer Attack’s “Since When” begins without the listener leaving the chair. Bardo Pond’s saturated bodily mass does not disappear into the ritual of flipping a record. It remains suspended in short-term memory while Flying Saucer Attack begin dissolving matter into hiss, distance and overloaded signal. The transition becomes compositional even though the artists did not collaborate.

That new continuity is the real subject of the CD edition. Disc one joins Bardo Pond, Flying Saucer Attack and Jessamine into a nearly seventy-minute passage from body to atmosphere to mechanism. Disc two moves from Roy Montgomery’s multiplied guitar devotion through Loren Mazzacane Connors’ fractured revolt and into the exposed mortal ritual of Charalambides. The original sides remain intact, but their borders have become permeable. Each work begins altering the interpretation of the one before it.

The reissue’s catalog number deepens this numerical strangeness. The original was DFR-25; the CD is DFR-50. Drunken Fish’s catalog had doubled between editions, and the release that once occupied one numbered position reappeared at its mathematical multiple. This may be accidental, but Harmony of the Spheres is exactly the kind of object that makes accidental ratios feel meaningful. Its ancient philosophical source imagines number, interval and cosmic movement as aspects of one concealed order. Here the music travels from twenty-five to fifty, from three records to two discs, from six sides to two sequences, while retaining the same underlying duration. The body changes; the proportion survives.

The compact disc also makes the title literal in a way the vinyl edition could not. The old idea of celestial harmony was founded upon number: orbital relationships translated into imagined musical proportion. A CD stores sound numerically, sampling a continuous vibration and reconstructing it through a precisely timed digital system. Music that repeatedly seems organic, cosmic, handmade and physically unstable is now carried by calculation. Bardo Pond’s distortion, Flying Saucer Attack’s tape fog, Connors’ torn guitar and Christina Carter’s voice all become encoded information. The ancient dream that number might conceal music meets a modern device that actually rebuilds audible music from numbers.

Yet the CD does not sound spiritually cleaner because it is digital. These recordings are full of material resistance. Amplifiers overload. Tape and distortion obscure sources. Fingers strike, bow and scrape strings. Voices disappear into surrounding frequencies. The apparent purity of digital storage preserves music devoted to impurity. That contradiction prevents the set from becoming a demonstration of technological progress. The CD can reproduce the sounds reliably, but it cannot tame what those sounds are doing.

The front image appears almost to acknowledge this conflict. A rectangular engraving floats inside an enormous black field. Human figures, instruments, circular diagrams, celestial forms and a monstrous open mouth have been packed into one unstable vertical scene. It resembles an illustration from a book whose religious, scientific and theatrical systems have become entangled. The circles may be planets, drums, targets, speakers or diagrams of vibration. The musicians appear to summon order while the mouth below threatens to swallow the entire arrangement.

On the twelve-inch box, that image participated in a large tactile environment with screened surfaces, a substantial booklet and vellum divisions. Reduced to CD dimensions, it becomes less like an altar and more like a secret manuscript. The black border grows psychologically larger because the central image has become physically smaller. The listener must lean toward it. Monumentality becomes intimacy.

The back cover provides the reissue’s clearest visual theory. Artist names and track titles sit above a nearly invisible system of orbital rings. The circles do not illustrate one central hierarchy in which a star performer occupies the middle and lesser artists revolve outside. They overlap and extend beyond the frame. The diagram implies that each body may be the center of another system not fully visible here. A compilation can only capture the portion of each artist’s orbit passing through this temporary field.

This is especially appropriate because the six artists were never members of one unified scene. Bardo Pond came from Philadelphia’s heavy psychedelic underground. Flying Saucer Attack developed its rural, home-recorded signal world in Bristol. Jessamine emerged from the Pacific Northwest. Roy Montgomery carried New Zealand post-punk, folk, drone and solitary guitar practice into a radically personal language. Loren Connors had spent years reducing blues and improvisation to spectral gestures. Charalambides transformed folk intimacy, silence and free exploration from Texas outward. Drunken Fish did not document a local movement. The label recognized gravitational resemblance across distance.

The original box made that recognition visible before history had fully confirmed it. By 1999, only three years had passed, but three years moved quickly within the independent music networks of that decade. The artists’ catalogs had expanded. Listeners had begun connecting psychedelic rock, drone, private folk, home recording, post-rock, improvisation and minimal guitar music in ways that would become increasingly familiar during the following decade. What appeared in 1996 as an unusually intuitive gathering could already be heard in 1999 as a map whose routes were continuing beyond the box. Later criticism would describe the collection as a landmark and unusually prescient, but the CD arrived while that prescience was still becoming visible. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

The reissue therefore changes the work’s temporal position. The vinyl box was an event in the present tense. It said: these six artists belong inside one object now, even though no convenient genre adequately explains why. The CD says: this event deserves to remain available because its relationships are beginning to matter beyond the original moment. Reissue becomes an early form of historical recognition.

That recognition creates an unavoidable tension between rarity and access. A limited object derives part of its emotional power from care, scarcity and physical specificity. Owners may have searched for it, saved money, carried the heavy box home and lived with the knowledge that relatively few copies existed. A CD edition cannot reproduce that encounter, and pretending otherwise would cheapen both formats. But protecting the exclusivity of the box by allowing the music to disappear would confuse the scarcity of an object with the value of the art inside it.

The 1999 edition chooses transmission. It does not counterfeit the original experience by producing a miniature imitation of every physical component. It accepts that another body will create another relationship. The CD is lighter, cheaper, easier to ship, easier to play continuously and less vulnerable to the surface damage that can gradually alter long quiet passages. It can enter more rooms. The original box remains what it was, while the music acquires another route through the world.

Disc one gains particular force from this route. “Sangh Seriatim” begins with the body: bass, drums, voice, flute and guitar moving as one narcotic procession. The title’s sense of ordered succession becomes prophetic because the entire disc is now arranged seriatim, one sphere following another without manual interruption. Bardo Pond make repetition feel communal and biological. Even at their most distorted, the music retains the sensation of several people breathing inside the same physical event.

Flying Saucer Attack then weaken the certainty of those bodies. “Since When” is divided into four indexed sections, making its internal stages visible on the CD player’s display. The listener can watch numbers change while the sound itself makes boundaries difficult to perceive. This is another specifically digital paradox: the machine reports exact divisions inside music devoted to indistinction. Part one becomes part two at a precise second, but the atmosphere crosses that border without presenting identification papers.

The track indexing permits navigation, yet the strongest experience may come from refusing to use it. Played without intervention, the four movements form a study in information appearing and disappearing through noise. Melody exists behind damage, rhythm gathers beneath atmospheric debris, and the recording seems to alternate between remembering and forgetting itself. The CD promises perfect retrieval while the music stages failed reception.

Jessamine’s “22:30” completes the first disc by giving uncertainty a motor. After Bardo Pond’s organic procession and Flying Saucer Attack’s collapsing transmission, Jessamine sound like a system assembling itself from the remaining particles. Repetition becomes less geological and more architectural. Drums, bass, guitar and electronics establish a machine whose stability is continually troubled by improvisational activity.

The title is itself numerical, resembling either a duration or a point on a twenty-four-hour clock. The listed track runs longer than the title suggests, which adds another tiny displacement between number and experience. Time can be measured precisely while still being felt inaccurately. Twenty-three minutes inside Jessamine’s structure may seem brief when attention enters the pulse, or enormous when the listener waits for conventional development. Disc one ends by revealing that the clock and consciousness are not operating according to the same system.

Changing to disc two is the CD edition’s one major required physical intervention. This remaining break becomes more important because most of the original side changes have vanished. The listener leaves a first disc dominated by bands and enters a second disc that gradually narrows toward exposed individual or duo expression. The two CDs are not officially titled, but they begin to resemble collective and solitary hemispheres.

Roy Montgomery opens the second with “Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull,” and the CD format alters the scale of its solitude. On vinyl, Montgomery occupied a complete side equivalent to the band sides surrounding him. On the CD, his layered guitar follows almost immediately after the listener changes discs, becoming the new system’s creation story. One person multiplies until he produces enough internal voices to replace an ensemble.

The fantasia is also about transmission across generations. Sandy Bull’s example passes into Montgomery without being copied literally. The theme becomes permission, and permission becomes another composition. This is precisely what the reissue itself accomplishes. It does not preserve the original package unchanged. It receives the box’s organizing principle and reconstructs it within another medium.

Montgomery’s later return to this piece as “Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull (Slight Return)” confirms that the composition was never a sealed monument. It continued orbiting its maker, available for simplification, revision and renewed performance. A theme survives not through immobility but through the capacity to produce further variation.

Loren Mazzacane Connors breaks that expansion into four sharply defined pieces. The CD display names “Flames,” “The Gathering,” “Revolt!” and “Fand (A Tear)” separately, allowing the listener to select them as independent tracks. Yet playing them in sequence reveals that their meaning depends upon consequence. Fire leads to assembly, assembly to uprising, uprising to grief. The final tear prevents the revolt from being romanticized as pure liberation.

This sequence also resists the cosmic abstraction suggested by the collection’s title. The spheres may possess mathematical order, but human history contains violence, fracture and mourning. Connors introduces a world in which harmony cannot mean peace or pleasing agreement. His guitar tears the surface, forcing the collection to account for dissonance as a necessary relationship rather than a failure of order.

Charalambides close the disc with “Naked in Our Deathskins,” and the CD’s continuous architecture makes the entrance feel like the aftermath of Connors’ revolt. Tom and Christina Carter do not resolve the violence. They remove nearly everything that could distract from vulnerability. Voice, guitar, breath and silence reveal the mortal organism beneath the compilation’s cosmic language.

The plural “our” becomes crucial here. Deathskin is not the isolated property of a doomed individual. Every performer and listener arrives clothed in it. The body that changes records, presses play, adjusts volume and eventually stops hearing is part of the system. Harmony of the Spheres may imagine immense cosmic relationships, but its final work returns every abstraction to finite flesh.

This ending changes under digital repetition. A vinyl side reaches its locked or open runout and leaves the needle physically circling after the music has ended. A CD stops, returns to its menu or begins again according to the player’s settings. One medium ends in mechanical rotation; the other ends in numerical instruction. Neither is neutral. The silence following Charalambides has been shaped by the machine producing it.

The FLAC archive on this post creates a third version of the 1999 edition. The original CD translated six vinyl sides into two optical discs. The archive translates those discs into files capable of existing without either the vinyl box or the compact-disc package. Unlike the earlier catalog-number MP3 archive connected to the 1996 post, this lossless folder explicitly preserves the CD audio without lossy data reduction. The archive now contains two legitimate digital lives of the same music: a smaller MP3 representation of DFR-25 and a much larger FLAC representation of DFR-50.

Keeping both matters. The later file does not make the earlier one meaningless, just as the CD did not erase the triple LP. Each documents a different point in the music’s movement. The MP3 carries the logic of compact circulation and the early history of the blog’s uploads. The FLAC carries a lossless version of the official CD reconfiguration. The posts become less like duplicates than parallel observations taken from different positions.

This is closely related to the idea behind the title. A sphere cannot be completely represented by one flat image. It must be approached through several projections, each preserving some relationships and distorting others. The triple LP, double CD, MP3 archive and FLAC archive are projections of one musical body. None contains the total experience, but together they reveal dimensions that a single edition would conceal.

The vinyl box teaches segmentation, scale and ceremony. The CD teaches continuity and transmission. The MP3 teaches portability and survival through compression. The FLAC teaches preservation through abundance, accepting a larger file so that more of the digital signal remains intact. The object does not possess one true form standing above the rest. Its history is the movement among forms.

The 1999 edition may therefore be the most conceptually revealing version even though it is not the most physically spectacular. The original box declares itself extraordinary before the needle drops. The CD must prove its importance through use. Its achievement becomes apparent only when the listener notices that three separate artists have begun forming one vast composition without their individual recordings being altered.

Disc one is not merely Bardo Pond plus Flying Saucer Attack plus Jessamine. It becomes mass passing into signal and signal acquiring mechanical consciousness. Disc two is not merely Montgomery plus Connors plus Charalambides. It becomes solitary expansion, historical fracture and mortal exposure. The CD discovers two long arcs hidden inside the six-side arrangement.

This is what a worthwhile reissue can do. It need not add bonus tracks, alternate takes or explanatory scholarship to produce new meaning. Sometimes changing the path is enough. Remove four required physical interruptions and the listener hears relationships previously broken by ritual. Reduce a large box to a smaller object and the image changes from monument to encrypted message. Divide six sides into two discs and another symmetry emerges.

Harmony does not require simultaneous sound. None of these six artists play together, and the pieces retain their separate personnel, recording conditions and intentions. Their harmony occurs through memory. Bardo Pond continues resonating while Flying Saucer Attack begin. Montgomery remains present inside Connors’ flames. Connors’ tear changes the exposed body of Charalambides. The listener becomes the medium in which the pieces finally overlap.

The 1996 box made six worlds visible. The 1999 edition teaches those worlds how to travel together. That is not a lesser achievement or a repetition of the original. It is the second half of the idea.