You might not have heard of Emil Amos or Holy Sons, but that isn't hindering the project's full steam-ahead creative mission. Holy Sons' Survivalist Tales was one of my favorite albums of 2010. It's the solo project of Emil Amos (Grails, Om) and Survivalist Tales is the ninth Holy Sons album. Survivalist Tales is an epic, sprawling yet focused album that uses the lens of science fiction to examine the psychic frontiers of the present.
In an e-mail interview with WIRED, Amos talked about Holy Sons and Survivalist Tales:
“Holy Sons is a hermetic project based on the inner reality of one person, so it needs the traditional narrative ceiling to be removed in order to reflect the infinity that exists in a human being... I think the most famous example of exploiting sci-fi’s flexible scenarios to suit an artist’s selfish narratives was the way Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone in order to talk about issues that his editors usually wouldn’t allow."
"I also imagined Survivalist Tales being like the film Fantastic Voyage, but if it had been a journey into the human mind instead of the body. It was also built to be a blustery hi-fi record in the tradition of the sonic pretension of albums like The Wall... Survivalist Tales began as a metaphor about the experiences of somebody like Jeremiah Johnson, in order to represent one person’s mortal struggles against the elements. But no record is truly ever a concept record, and probably shouldn’t be. See Styx’s Kilroy Was Here for that brand of thematic failure."
But why am I writing about Holy Sons and Survivalist Tales on a New Mexico-centric blog? Because, dear reader, Holy Sons performed last evening in The City Different!
T~Cubed and Transit music presented an all-ages show at Corazón, featuring Holy Sons, avant Gothic Americana-nauts Castanets, and indie house missionaries Delorean.
Scroll on for videos by Castanets and Delorean.
Castanets - My Heart from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.
