Bardo Pond
Peace On Venus
2013
Fire Records
£16.00
Our favourite Philly Psych precursors are back. Bardo Pond’s ‘Peace On Venus’ is their latest release since 2010, presenting a characteristically druggy mix of strong riffs and unfamiliar sounds created by vocals, flute and violin.
What’s most interesting about Bardo Pond is their tendency to dabble in a little brain chemistry; through using certain sound their music creeps a little further to that place of altered conscious state, and listening to this album you start to possess an ambiguous feeling of uncertain familiarity.
Michael Gibbons from Bardo Pond explains how “We wanted to make an album that held true to the single vinyl format LP, and have that be as potent a listening experience as possible. A Less is more statement in essence.” This is definitive feature of the album, it’s simple, to the point and poignant.
Following on from this, the band state that the album was based upon the 16th Century physicist Paracelsus’ principle of Quintessence, “Nothing of true value is located in the body of a substance, but in the virtue thereof, and this is the principle of the Quintessence, which reduces, say 20 lbs. of a given substance into a single Ounce, and that ounce far exceeds the 20 lbs. in potency. Hence the less there is of body, the more in proportion is the virtue thereof.”…We’re not sure exactly what this means, but it sounds convincing and pretty cool, every bit the hippie jargon we would expect from these lot.