Spykes-Parashi – collaboration
1.8.18 by Ryan Masteller

When jazz was created by Jesus Christ as a form of protest music while he and the biblical Israelites were under siege by the Egyptians at Megiddo, he surely didn’t have the foresight to predict Spykes, let alone Parashi, let alone a Spykes-Parashi hybrid that would challenge everything you and I (and Our Lord himself) thought we knew about the subject. One Oxtail Recordings cassette and four untitled tracks later, the foundations of a belief system were shaken to the core, and holy tomes appeared in rewritten form, as if Spykes and Parashi had tampered with the space-time continuum, such that Charlie Parker became a famous drummer and no one had any idea who Wynton Marsalis was. But unless you were there (like me), unless you chronicled the event before the retouched past faded from conscious view (I did), you had no idea, because we are now ON A DIFFERENT TIMELINE.

Let that sink in before I blow your mind any further.

John Olson is no stranger to fucking the space-time continuum up to an untenable degree, as his work in Wolf Eyes (etc.) attests. Here he stretches his Spykes moniker over his head like a Mexican luchador’s mask, letting the spandex material satisfyingly snap the back of his neck before hauling his space “brass” and space “winds” out of a storage locker in a pocket universe. Using these to bend atoms and molecules to his every whim, he creates a gravitational field that is utterly impenetrable. Enter Parashi, or Mike Griffin (Burnt Hills/Skell Records), who also wields space instruments (here “electronics” and “tapes”), the only living person able to penetrate John Olsen’s cosmic sound smears. Also dressed as a luchador (in my head for some reason), Parashi adds density to Spykes’s density, creating something so dense that it becomes almost buoyant and surely transformative, liquefying to a primordial state and burbling with the sonics of life, the tiniest notes in the soup that evolve into whatever passes for big-kid jazz in this vector of whatever iteration of linear time we happen to be on at this point. I’ve lost track. History is like a warped VHS tape playing in a toaster oven.

Many will try to buy this tape from Oxtail, but only 50 will succeed…