Greg Jamie
The ice age we are collectively experiencing this winter almost makes sense. As we collectively attempt to gain a sense of grounding & understanding our world, others, ourselves & everything in-between-the best many/any of us can do is to make the best of the time we can. And in a world where monetization by way of mechanized approaches to aesthetics informs the models of modern mediocrity-Greg Jamie breaks the veil of ennui with Crazy Time produced by cult pop legends Dimples. The artist behind Blood Warrior & O’Death presents the result of deep focused recordings at home in Portland, Maine with an assist from Colby Nathan (Dimples), further enhanced by Greg Hartunian (also from Dimples) in LA, and mastered by Caleb Mulkerin. Available January 19 through Orindal Records, the following are the sounds that are made for remote island get aways, deep off the grid forests & jungles where the sidewalks & crosswalks end into the places where even compasses fail to accurately record with precision. Greg Jamie’s Crazy Time is a hymnal made for our current time of upheavals, unrest & odd opportunities to achieve a sense of infinite enlightenment.
Crazy Time itself is an album that opens up a portal to some other dimension & era. Greg Jamie initiate the cycle of current era pastorals with the summoning of the elements on “Inherit The Wind” that is executed like an ancient trad ballad resurrected from a place of obscurity. Ruminations on items of existence & the weight of the world are witnessed on the atmospheric & steady hop-along gallop of “This Life” that reflects with road dusted harmonies that echo outward in the spaces between day break & the glow of the setting sun. Jamie casts songs like timeless baroque hymns that send string-wrapped hymns up toward the reaches of heavenly heights as heard on the melancholy melody of chances & measures on “Tarred and Feathered”. Meditations on topography & other surrounding material items are heard through the understated electric ambiance that permeates “Everything Here” that fills the atmosphere with an array of cryptic sensations & sounds that speak to the spirit & mind simultaneously.
The titular song “Time Went Crazy” brings a suite of meditations where the notion of time as we know it (and everything we don’t understand about the construct) is delivered in intuitive controlled collages of elements that feel both distant & present at the same time. These aspects of chronology & place echo all over the album, as “Bells of Victory” ring out like an antiquated battle song known only perhaps by a fallen unknown soldier from another era as meditative cycles continue on the reflections of nature & the self on the acoustic minimalism “My Garden is Fever”. Everywhere on the album there are senses of renewal & redemption as experienced on the heart drawn homecoming of “When I Get Home” that leads the listener down past the old estate, the wooden boat house as the beautiful strings sweep you down to “The Lake” for a swim in the dim evening light. As the album of Crazy Time draws to completion; Greg Jamie guides you to those sacred places of the heart & soul where aspects & elements of the past & future are conjoined with thoughts in the present that offers myriad points of pause as the mind sails serenely through the tributary streams of consciousness.
Greg Jamie shared the following candid & insightful reflections with us about Crazy Time, life, art & more:
wrote some things down while thinking about crazy time and drinking tequilla alone as it got dark on jan 9 in portland maine 4:36:
What version of reality is my sad reality and what were these songs supposed to do (about it)?
I know I am trying at a narrative—a false alternative universe—ghost choirs, circular melodies that are supposed to last forever.
My name and these songs started empty—skeletal frameworks there so that something else can be loud against against it. Can lean against it.
I can see characters walking through a forest naked and alone but fearless—heading to a house to get warm but they don’t know where it is.
Crossing a border. There is a war. There always is but the narrator is not trustworthy.
Specifically there is a better album hidden inside of this album. If you listen closely you can hear it.
I met Colby [Nathan of Dimples] towards the end of 2010 when I opened a listening room for northeast weirdos with my ex-wife. Six years later I had a room in my apartment for him to stay when he needed it in exchange for real help—get these songs out of my head and expand on what I’m hearing. It’s a horrible thing to do to a person but we are still friends (I’d like to think close friends). Do you hear those bass lines? He wrote some of them from humming them first.
None of this should exist but I know I want to make albums for my whole life. I like the medium but I’m not afraid to share that I’m scared (of it). I know no one is truly listening. That void is a part of the sound after all. What if we made it sound like the end of the world and no one had any headphones. Or two cats hiding or a dog eating their shit. What if you were house-sitting in the winter (or spring) and every day just blended. It’s done when you go away, and then its just starting. And we invited people into my living room and offered everyone eggplant parm, but it feels like a dream.
When did it take shape and how was everyone involved and why is my name on it and who are the characters in the songs. What is the mystery and why does it sound alone and full at once.
Every album says: I could tell you a story but you wouldn’t listen anyway—and what do you say then? Thats the starting point—as I watch my cat attack his own tail.
Some times are lifetimes—this album took a year to make but was only recorded when it was convenient and it was never really convenient. So we started from there.
Greg Jamie’s album Crazy Time will be available January 19 via Orindal Records.
