To listen to dr. rift’s self-titled debut album is to experience something akin to a fever dream. One tumbles headfirst into the looking glass, where up is down, left is right, and what is within and without becomes blurred and blended as the spinning of the record becomes synonymous with the spinning of one’s mind, like getting day drunk on homemade bottles of zinfandel while the summer’s hot hands massage into one’s head an impending heat stroke.
To try to unspool its textures into text — its world into words — is a fool’s game, and so instead I will simply encourage one to dive into the mirror without thinking — there will be no shards to cut you, there will be no resistance, the solidity of reality will collapse around you and it will feel as if you are jumping into a cool pool of water. You will not drown. You will breathe underwater with ease. Light will bounce and create patterns on the blue bottom, and in them will be written the secrets of the universe, and they will form and collapse, and with them you will also form and collapse, their meaning, their importance, will be as fleeting as a popped bubble. A godly hand will embrace you, pluck you from the pool and rest you in a bed of grass, where each blade is a soft memory of captured sunlight, where day and night flickers, strobes, a torrent of moving pictures that give motion to life, in what becomes like a parade of clouds and cloud shadows across a prairie field, where flowers bloom and wilt with speed, where plumes of pollen trace the wind with calligraphic flourishes, an ancient script of curves and spirals, where hands are plunged deep into the soil, churned amongst roots and rocks and dirt and peat as if squeezing the bones of the underworld.
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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.
