The Campfire Headphase

[detit tani]

I am on a self imposed Inferno break for a week and surprisingly the album I have replaced it with is Campfire Headphase, that and Trans Canada Highway. It got me thinking, is Inferno the album that was scrapped after Geogaddi for being too electronic?

[Redd Panderson]

I have been thinking about this more generally as Inferno continues to sit with me and to influence how I hear their previous works. I think there's material on this album that originates across the work that went into more than one of their previous releases/unreleases.

I'm sure Inferno also blurs the line between "pulling on/refining previously unreleased material" and "working in the style of previous material heard and unheard." Their strategy of producing 100s of tracks and releasing only a fraction must give them a lot of artistic control not only over the quality of what's ultimately released but also how it exists in relationship to their own discography and to the wider music world it comes out in.

Speaking of The Campfire Headphase, I think it may be intentional that this middle album in their 5 mainline albums is the pivot point after which they went in a more cinematic direction. It's as though:

-Music Has The Right To Children: childhood, Sesame Street, wonder and whimsy with sinister undercurrents and systems beyond your reckoning but that mostly go over your head while leaving a funny feeling.
-Geogaddi: entering and living the teenage years, becoming aware of the light and the dark side of the adult world, beginning to feel angst and seeking after identity.
-The Campfire Headphase: young adulthood. Finding yourself. A new level of freedom after living with parents and before becoming a parent / taking on adult responsibilities yourself, including going on adventures / road trips, culminating in a moment of awakening around a campfire.
-Tomorrow's Harvest: adulthood to midlife crisis, possibly becoming a parent, reaching a personal collapse where old ways of living no longer work and even cause problems and gradually need to be let go // some of the same sort of dynamics causing problems at the societal level. More society-level than Inferno, involving the process of finding your place in relation to the world. The personal sacrifices that come with age, and yet also the beginning of "knowing the score" or the gradual refinement of wisdom.
-Inferno: entering old age, arriving at a personal understanding of your relationship to life and the universe. Joy of mastery. More personal and cosmic than Tomorrow's Harvest. Excorcising old demons at last, facing mortality/death and accepting loss, reflecting on your legacy and what you will leave the world once your time comes.

Before The Campfire Headphase, there's the beauty and innocence and wonder and fear of childhood. After The Campfire Headphase, there's a mature clarity that explores light and dark and coming to terms with inner demons, societal demons, what you've wrought, and whatnot. The Campfire Headphase is that brief respite of freedom in young adulthood before the weight of responsibilities and the problems of old habits come crashing down on you.

Honestly it's really beautiful as a whole. Possibly one of the most well-crafted discographies in music. It's the journey of life!

[Redd Panderson]

I just want to add that I believe this symmetrical 5-album structure / radial pattern motif is very intentional and is in fact a sort of model that compares the operation of memory across time to the radial shape of radio waves, among other things, perhaps (a very poetic engagement with electronic music as a medium). It's an idea I want to explore more still.

[detit tani]

yes its a journey, being the same age as them I get a lot of the sentiments of Inferno and feel we are at the same stage in life. For me personally when I first watched Tape05 i felt it was asking after half a century "what do you believe in, what gets you through it?" faith, science, power, freedom, family, nature any of those things or none of them...

[Redd Panderson]

I just want to add that I believe this symmetrical 5-album structure / radial pattern motif is very intentional and is in fact a sort of model that compares the operation of memory across time to the radial shape of radio waves, among other things, perhaps (a very poetic engagement with electronic music as a medium). It's an idea I want to explore more still.

I wanted to return to this after relistening to The Campfire Headphase a week ago. Dayvan Cowboy has rarely clicked for me, but it did last week. The difference between the first half and second half feels transcendent! It's quite the transition with the drums fading in at right around the halfway point, and it had me wondering: if Dayvan Cowboy is on their middle album, where does it fall numerically across the tracks of all their mainline albums?

Sure enough, in the 90 tracks of their five mainline albums (excluding, of course, bonus tracks), Dayvan Cowboy is track 45. Pretty much exactly in the middle, with A Moment Of Clarity opening the second half of the tracks of their mainline albums and leading to the slower, moodier second half of TCH. At the discography level, it, too, shifts to the overall darker and more cinematic tone of Tomorrow's Harvest and Inferno after the awakening of Dayvan Cowboy / A Moment of Clarity.

Dayvan Cowboy is at the center of their five albums, it's the fifth track of TCH, and it's exactly 5 minutes long.

There's something poetic about looking at its centrality alongside its music video of folks falling to Earth from the upper atmosphere: gravity's radial pattern of celestial objects in orbit.

I just think it's neat!