assorted found percussion, toy xylophone, African slit drum, floor tom
The title came after the music on this one, as it did on many of the tracks. It’s an all percussion piece that goes from these metalic robot-like sounds to this very African sounding percussion, and finally to what sounds like a temple bell high on a windy mountain plain. I finished this and thought, what the hell can I call this? My first idea was something like “percussion around the world!”- this sort of very early 20th century holdover from the 19th, about the wonders of exotic exploration. That motif kind of stuck around but just didn’t really fit the rest of the album well, although there is a real turn-of-the-last-century vibe to some of it, including the typeface, kind of art nouveau. Anyway I started working backwards from that- OK, there’s that “Wonders of darkest Africa!” vibe, and I thought, hmm…King Solomon’s Mines. You know, lost treasure/lost city and all that jazz. OK, but what about the robot sounds at the beginning? And I thought…mines…robots….underground robots? Deros! Bingo, I had my title and a good laugh all at once.
The Deros- short for “detrimental robots”- were part of “The Shaver mystery”. Richard Shaver was a fellow who believed that there were evil robots living in underground caverns, animated by the spirits of dead Lemurians. These deros caused all the world’s ills by the use of invisible rays that they aimed at people from their caverns. Shaver sent a letter about this to magazine editor and publisher Ray Palmer, who proceeded to capitolize on Shaver’s stories after the published letter brought a huge response. People were claiming they had their own experience with the deros. This sold a lot of magazines for Palmer, and Shaver was very active for a few years. There was a flying saucer angle in there too, apparently the Deros flew these and parked them in their secret caverns- if memory serves, the bases were at the poles and that’s where the main entrances were. Do I think they really existed? No. Do I think Shaver’s fantasies may have inadvertantly mirrored some other phenomena, specifically energy manifestations and UFO activity? Yes, and this is probably where some of the letters from readers came in. Granted, they may all have been crackpots too; but this broke before Kenneth Arnold’s sightings in ’47 ushered in the modern wave of UFO publicity. Before that, anyone dealing with that phenomenon would have been in need of some kind of framework to reference their experiences to, particularly if there was contact involved. Too bad for them it came from Shaver and Palmer!
Oh, and as for why the Deros would discover King Solomon’s mines- they operate underground in a worldwide network, supposedly, so if anyone was likely to find a lost mine, it would be a subterranean race with superior technology! All that’s missing now is Fu Manchu. But if we can believe what our ears tell us, after discovering the mines in Africa, the evil deros emerged with their loot at a mountaintop monastary in mysterious Tibet. Can Fu be far away?
Throwing mathcore, emo, and ambient into the mix, Estonia's Kaschalot push progressive rock's multitasking approach to its limits. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 10, 2021