Polymath (or solipsistic) Kavus Torabi (Gong, The Utopia Strong…etc) has a new album afoot. A tour too!
photo: Layla Sunshine
WATER INTO WINE
With its name inspired by a dream, October By Name – coming on 2nd October on his Believers Roast label – marks out a new chapter in the career of Kavus Torabi. The psychedelic polymath expands his creativity via co-ordinates entirely of his own.
A decade so far in which his prolific artistry has only been matched by an equally turbulent period in his personal life yet the alchemical charge that has resulted matches the mystical origins of the album’s title with six songs that inhabit a similarly surreal and transcendental landscape. As Kavus reckons “If you can’t trust your subconscious, who can you trust?”
A CATCHY LITTLE DITTY
Water Into Wine, a particularly striking example of his current headspace, is a disarmingly catchy ditty with a philosophical stance inspired by friends and acquaintances, somewhat in the great lineage of British psychedelic pathfinders through the ages (the triumvirate of Syd Barrett, Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope being an example).
It’s at heart a bittersweet yet optimistic reverie that is pure Kavus. “Perhaps there is no free will and we’re all just playing out the consequences of our genes, insecurities and childhood damage” he reflects on the fundamentals of this song “But I have to believe change is possible because, honestly, what’s the point in anything if it isn’t?”
TALKING EPIPHANIES
Not merely a more optimistic and beatific sounding record than its cathartic and intense predecessor The Banishing, October By Name sees Kavus evolving as an artist in ways he maybe didn’t even predict himself. Both inspired by his recent work with Gong and Cardiacs, and inhabiting a serious change of modus operandi via his work to date with the improvisational project The Utopia Strong, he created a new method of writing where all styles converge and overlap “As with the first time I heard Cardiacs at the age of sixteen and thinking ‘Oh! You can make stuff like this’, so I had a similar epiphany three decades on.”
“Increasingly, I’m becoming more solipsistic,” he says, ” going further into my own world creatively. As long as the bubble I’m in keeps giving me songs, I’m OK with that. Honestly, every one I get over the line, that still excites, thrills and engages me is a blessing”.
Pre-order the album here.
Kavus Torabi: Bandcamp