Breaking the sound barrier

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Tomorrow night will see a bleak and little-known industrial corner of Kensington morphed into a throbbing, swirling mountain of cacophonous joy — a transformation of alchemic proportions to be executed by none other than one of Philly’s longest-rocking bands: Bardo Pond.
The fittingly offbeat location to host this circus of a gig is the Vacuum, an ephemeral and somewhat mysterious venue located on Second Street, just north of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. While the Vacuum itself is just beginning to trickle onto the scene as a mainstream Philly venue, Bardo Pond is a virtual local institution, with roots dating to 1989.
That’s the year Kensington-based brothers Michael and John Gibbons decided to get together and lay the foundations of Bardo Pond’s often dark and menacing take on free-form rock.
Now, nearly two decades and three additional band members later, Bardo Pond is still ripping eardrums to bits and blazing its way through sonic jungles of distortion and reverb in search of unimagined regions of the psyche.
The Bardo Pond discography itself is a venerable body of work; lo-fi CD-R recordings lie beside a string of Matador releases, and a host of appearances on other labels paired with an array of side projects make the band’s contribution too varied to even attempt a summary.
Two recent releases, however, serve as sublime reference points. Last year’s Ticket Crystals marked Bardo Pond’s seventh studio-produced release, and is the band’s most recent release to date resembling a bona fide album.
Blossoming immediately into a nearly 10-minute flourish of droning guitars, splashing percussion and eerie female vocals, album-opener Destroying Angel is as good an introduction as any to Bardo Pond.
But if you think breaking the listener in with a bruiser of a song three times the length of its pop peers is pushing it, just hang on. Destroying Angel is, in a sense, one of Ticket Crystals’ more succinct tracks, with four others on the eight-song album crossing the 10-minute barrier.
The biggest beast of all is the 18-minute FC II — a fuzzy, pulsating mass of instrumental song that could leave Herbie Hancock himself winded.
Don’t let the notion of length mislead you, though. Bardo Pond transcends the playfulness of Phish-esque jam bands, and the group’s extended arrangements never feel like contrived exercises in stamina.
Rather, songs like Destroying Angel and FC II seem naturally to fill in the voluminous spaces created by the musicians, with heroic guitar riffs emerging at every turn and demanding a thorough battle before being extinguished in a blur of climactic, triumphant noise.
These are songs that have you poised in wonder and frozen in awe, not fingering the "skip" button with impatience. It is within these colossal and harrowing tracks that Bardo Ponds’ well-honed technical skills best merge with its penchant for drug-tinged mysticism and modern-day psychedelia.
Yet, as dark and other-worldly as the Bardo sound can get, there are always flashes of salvation, primarily in the form of Isobel Sollenberg’s waifish vocals and sweet flute interludes.
Ticket Crystals is also broken up by its lighter moments, and perhaps no more so than on the band’s version of the Beatles standard Cry Baby Cry.
Another excellent and much more timely introduction to the creativity behind Bardo Pond is Alesehir’s The Philosophy of Living Fire. Released a few weeks ago, Living Fire is the third Alesehir album and features the Gibbons brothers with Bardo drummer Jason Kourkounis. Only available as a 12-inch vinyl LP, Living Fire features a single band to each side, and both songs are instrumental forays into soul-searching musical exploration.
Here, the Gibbons brothers team with Kourkounis to showcase an ever-evolving and maturing style, a philosophy of scorching and fearless improvisation. Michael Gibbons says the mood and direction taken on the latest Alesehir release will also likely be palpable on the next Bardo record, due out late next spring.
"Right now, everybody just wants to let loose," says Gibbons. "You just go, and you get to places where you’ve never even been before." oo
Bardo Pond will also have a "lost" album out in the coming months featuring unreleased works recorded between 1998 and 2003. ••

Check it out . . .

Who: Bardo Pond
What: Philly’s most venerable psych-rockers.
Where: The Vacuum, 1740 N. Second St., Kensington.
When: Friday, Nov. 16. Show starts at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10.