Search - Kurt Weisman :: Spiritual Sci-Fi

While Spiritual Sci-Fi is a result of work that Kurt Weisman has been undertaking for the last ten years, it's certainly also worth noting that he's a multi-instrumentalist in the acclaimed folk outfit Feathers as well as a member of J Mascis' Witch. Weisman's stunning musicality and absolute compositional prowess make this an extremely compelling and wonderfully musical experimental pop-folk recording. Kurt Weisman is a New England composer in his late twenties around whom all the wheels of life seem distinctly sped up (he's known for his extreme falsetto). Hair is cut into strange shapes and then suddenly shorn, moustaches appear and disappear with alarming frequency, cyber-punk outfits melt into freak-folk into noise into French bohemian--complete with beret. And it's all taken way too far to be considered "in fashion." He fills these forms with the content they suggest to him until they bear the mark of a kind of insanity. The songs already sound like they're floating above something else when you hear them with just voice and 12-string. These are not regular songs with weird production. The alternative to the expectation refers to the expectation. He seems to know every tricky thing that's ever happened in pop music and how to take it further ... but then takes that even further by giving verse 2 all these ear stretching variations on verse 1. There's a lot of weird meter stuff, little skips and jumps, or little things that get stretched that seem inspired by his own computer micro-editing techniques. The "song" and the "production" are a snake biting its own tail. It's not just electronic-sounding stuff (filters, pitch shifts, time stretches, delays, videogame sounds, synth sounds, noise, beats) that lives all over these songs, there are also all sorts of weird parts his friends put on top. Music teachers, ex-jazz students, and self-taught searchers: New England is the future of music. Chord upon chord upon chord upon chord. The "chord" is dead. This is something else. The whole history of the composition is right there in the same space just like the planet, the universe, and the soul. Creation and destruction are one.