Some music is slaved over, some forced; much of today’s music is canned, a product to be consumed, cleverly designed to check all the right boxes for inclusion on streaming services’ playlists and genre classifications. Some music arrives in dreams, sometimes fully formed, and some music, like New Tribe’s new long player Medicine Park, is only possible if the performers are fully opened up. When intuition, experience, collective chemistry, unguardedness, and receptivity come together in an act of improvisation, the music is as much channeled as composed. The performer — or conduit — is often baffled as the “song” wraps up, as may be the listener. What just happened? How were movements and themed sections created on the fly? What is the nature and source of music that just flows through? Who and what are we?
Amidst the currents of dis-ease, confusion, disconnection and despair, music can be medicine, as can sacred places, collective rituals, and an awareness of the abundance of health, abundance, joy, and love still left in the world. New Tribe’s Medicine Park, itself part of a Later Days trilogy of albums in 2020, is offered as Medicine. The majority of the album was improvised live in the studio in one take, especially the longer pieces. Minimal overdubs were added to these tracks and the resulting fractal journeys await the patient and observant listener. Like all good medicine one has to be receptive, one has to give some attention to details and one has to be willing to heal, in order for the healing to take place. Brian Eno once said of his Music for Airports that its audience “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.” This is one way to think about and approach New Tribe’s Medicine Park. From this entry point, one sees that the longer pieces on the record at times don’t demand attention but can still reward it, should it be fully given. But there are many other entry points into this panoramic musical landscape, many kinds of attention one might bring to the record, and many kinds of journeys through the music, each with their own payoff.
New Tribe music from its inception has always relied heavily on and thrived on collective improvisation. Medicine Park is their most fully fledged representation of this side of the music and highlights their extensive experience in cultivating group mind embodied vibrations. Alongside the expansive improvisation tracks on the album, something more akin to ‘songs’ provide more crystalline windows into the songwriting strengths of the group while providing some grounding from the spacier travels through the earthly cosmos. Taken together, the tracks comprising the record are music as antidote, as a technology of self-cultivation, as promise of an experience. Quoting Hunter S. Thompson: “Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…”
Be well.