Choral 9 is an electric campfire-story-song, a folky splice&rewind mixtape, even a sort of eerie film score where surprising dreamscapes may dance and duel for your attention, beckoning and guiding, navigating a strategic zigzag path through the woods…lovely, dark, and deep, as the old poem intones…melodic harmony and its beautifully battle-scarred inverse.

Musical-mayhem duo Zoé Zephyr and Theo Goodman are at the helm of the Zephyr Goodman project, each with over two decades under their belts of composing and performing, hunter-gathering melodies and rhythms along the way, musical cartographers in a teeming world of gardens, forests, swarming bloody borders, prisons, soundstages and dancefloors, street marches and tree-sits.

ANCIENT STORIES, NEW FREQUENCIES

You will find in this album old themes and new sounds, new ideas and old rhythms; a musical elixir infused with lyrics from Rilke to Rumi, Camus to the Invisible Committee, and original prose-poem melodic compositions from Zoe Zephyr, while Goodman’s instrumentally innovative soundscape embraces the ears at once without holding back. One moment minimalist, the next a riotous building and melding noise crescendo, Choral 9 slips like silk and bites like bolt cutters, streaming like sheets of music across a starry sky arching over a dystopian topographical map…with copious honey and mad amounts of hot sauce poured all over our compass. Keep walking.

ASK LESS WHAT IS MUSIC MADE OF, MORE WHAT IS MUSIC USED FOR

To be of use, to be of some service, to share skills and sound…beyond glib soundbites about fresh new thing and all that defying-genre jazz, let us look both for feeling, and utility (feeling is also very useful). Music is a tool and a weapon; a friend, a lover, a life preserver; a journal of the journey, nestling itself in the nook of the human brain where scent and memory reside. Music is life. So let’s kindly for a moment fuck genre, fuck nomenclature.

What is music made for DOING? It’s for us and with us, or against us. Choral 9 is a determined prayer and a raging lullaby, and with it, Zephyr Goodman has delivered it right in the middle of 2020. A pandemic-times auditory soundtrack that longs to walk or dance or march alongside…to accompany us through the very real and acutely uncertain times we’re living in. This is music for waking up to, for working to, for dancing and running to. This is music for slipping into dreamland. This music for people animals, fauna and flora. This is our song. Hearts are muscles the size of fists ~ keep loving, keep fighting.

Now listen.