The Mind Palace is a mnemonic device in which one walks through an imagined building to remember whatever it is they wished to remember; one furnishes this palace as intricately or exquisitely as they wish, and then all one has to do is saunter to and fro, from this room to that room, from the kitchen to the hallway, up the stairs, to the washroom, through the window and onto the roof, down the chimney, etc., and observe. The order of it, the cleanliness of its walls and floors, where everything is in its right place, ensures its details are truthfully and accurately recalled.
But there’s another, similar kind of place that exists, too. Surrounding the mind palace, passed its neatly trimmed hedges and perfectly mowed lawn, passed the boundaries of the palace proper, is a forgotten world: a world of forgetting, of disorder, of chaos, of entropy. It is the Mind Jungle, and it is this place, deep in its amnesiac overgrowth, where the Psychotic Gurus (and, now, VoidFaceRecords) live.
In the Mind Jungle:
there are no words, for all words have been forgotten;
there are no songs, only a continuum of noise;
there are no forms, no nothing to hold onto;
no paths or trails, for everything’s destroyed.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
