Horns, they sure sound pretty. Violins add to the nitty-gritty. And when the scratch of the guitar gets scratchin’, then you’ll know that rhythm carries all the action. The dance floor beckons! Turn the beat around. We all love percussion! Turn the beat upside down! It radiates a heat most everyone wants to bathe in. Most everyone wants to rock out, too—and, late at night, contemplate, cogitate and think through the goings-on in their world. To appropriate a line from Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes.
Yet, from the days of yore on through to the next century and beyond, we’re often presented and imprinted with a false dichotomy—a conditional formatting, if you will. Either you like this or that, but liking both? What’s wrong with you? When I was young, for example, “cool” kids eschewed disco. Others eschewed rock. And plenty from both sects eschewed the avant-garde ‘cause, heaven knows, it’s not the way it should be. It’s why many music fans are awash in “guilty pleasures,” if you think about it.
Dub Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange’s Inspire // Radicalise a hot tub of sonic bliss. Orchestrated by drummer-producer Ziggy Zeitgeist, it’s a mostly instrumental excursion that’s reminiscent of the ambient eccentricities of Jean-Michel Jarre, whose Oxygene, Zoolook and Rendez-Vous were late-night staples of my college years. Dance-floor delights meld with guitar solos, with spoken-word bits here and sung lyrics there. Tune them in, tune them out, doesn’t much matter; over time and repeated listens, everything sinks in.
Ziggy, apparently, is an Australian artist who—like Eilis Frawley—relocated to Berlin at some stage of his musical development. He’s joined by a crew of old friends and new acquaintances on the double album, which was recorded in Berlin and London. It’s a 15-track bonanza that, to double back to the first paragraph, contains multitudes. It mixes dance-floor delights with slow grooves with frenetic rock with jazzy and ambient compositions. It’s a wonderful listen.
The Old Grey Cat 
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