Paul Kidney Experience : Acousma
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Paul Kidney Experience : Acousma

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Sometimes you have a dream and shit gets really weird. There are images that could be people, or they might be animals. The furniture is made of rubber, and the walls are dripping like a Jackson Pollock painting. You try and understand the conversation, but it doesn’t make any sense; there’s someone from your primary school talking to you about a member of your family, but they don’t know each other. You’re late for an appointment that you can’t remember making, and why did you want to go there, anyway?  

The aural atmosphere is thick with strange sounds, screeching noises, a barely discernible discourse of confusion and exploration, a distant drum beat that seems to be keeping time, but maybe it’s just compounding your confused psychological state. There are colours in the air, but you can’t see them, only hear them and almost touch them. It’s like that acid trip you did back in the day when your senses opened up and you saw religious images that were amazing, but then you worried that you’d reached a higher plane of consciousness but you weren’t ready for it, and, oh no, were you ever going to return to normality. Like that moment when you fall out of the lysergic experience, you wake up and everything’s sort of normal, but why is normal so good anyway? Why can’t stuff just be weird and people enjoy it?  Who said straight was right?

And then there’s Paul Kidney Experience’s album, Acousma.  This isn’t an album of songs in the conventional sense. It’s the freakish dream, the trip that sends you into a different realm of cognitive experience, the mind shattering event that causes you to realise that nothing should ever be as it seems. The sound shimmers, the beats bend, the moment envelopes your brain and treats it to a kaleidoscopic experience that Timothy O’Leary always wanted us to understand was there if we were brave enough to see it. You don’t listen to Paul Kidney Experience, you absorb it. And if you survive it, you’re in a better place.

BY PATRICK EMERY

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