Lymbyc Systym
The Tints And Textures Of Endless Prophecy
Dec 24, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Brad Kopplin
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Astrology Days
original version appears on Love Your Abuser
Last year, we played a show in Eugene, OR. We had never played Eugene and weren't expecting much. Unfortunately for us, the venue was a 500 person capacity room and there were only about 30 people in attendance. It was kind of a bummer playing on a huge stage, through a giant sound system to a nearly empty room. On the last song of our rather uninspired set, we decided to just have the whole audience come up on the stage, along with our touring buddies The One AM Radio and Montag. We happened to be playing "Astrology Days," which has a really triumphant clapping part in it. Everyone on the stage was jumping up and down, stomping to the beat. Tambourines and shakers were passed around. People were playing on my keyboards and hitting cymbals. Basically, we instantly turned into this powerhouse 35-person band. It completely turned the night around, and it ended being one of our most memorable shows.
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Birds
original version appears on Love Your Abuser
The melodies in this song kind of reminded me of flying. So, that is where the title comes form. I wrote the foundation for this song while living at a Zen monastery near San Francisco. If it sounds a little too blissed out at certain parts, that is why.
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Processed Spirits
original version appears on Field Studies
This song could have a really deep spiritual meaning or it might refer to my favorite distilled beverage, whiskey. It's instrumental, so you'll never know...
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Narita
original version appears on Field Studies
This is the closing song off the new Field Studies split EP. In the summer of 2007, we toured Japan. On the last day of the trip, the opening band, a 7-piece Japanese group called 4 Bonjour's Parties, drove to Narita airport, an hour outside of the city, just to give us hugs and wave goodbye as we walked through security. It felt like we were leaving behind our best friends even though we had only met a week before. It was an incredibly overwhelming gesture of kindness.
The Lymbyc Systym sounds like prophecy ringing in from the timbers, smoking in from the highland fires and buzzing in as if it was a well-meaning tattle-tale, giving it to us straight, but also with inflections and adornments that we'd comment upon later to our close friends and family members were all very lovely touches. Jared Bell - he and his brother Mike make up the whole of the group these days - mentions something of a blissed out feeling when he refers to the band's "Birds," but we'll audaciously suggest that he doesn't even know the half of it - of what this music does to people when they're not looking.
This is a persistent brook of mountain water enriched with the wonderful taint of gold ore and magical dust and as we bend down, cup our hands and slurp some of it into our mouths, we can taste the gold and the all-knowing pixies or whomever shook that dust free from its hip pouch. It seems to carry with it a muscle relaxant that would never leave behind a trace should anyone ever come looking for it. It carries certain flights of fancy that ripple and pulse with triumphant coolness, a flare here and some dimply and bashful flair there. The lack of words gives these instrumentals all of the room in the world to stretch their spindly arms and legs, to curl and vine, to reverse and repeat. Without the entrapping language to shackle and stymie, it's left to the shadowy voices of the insides to do all of the interpreting, but they don't all speak at once. They come out, one at a time taking very well-behaved turns, and they chime in with sound to be more like harmonies than opinions. The prophecies have their own choir of heartbeats and low-beats, of drifting submission and faraway lulls that rendezvous in the middle of the eyes and ears - so essentially, the brain, somewhere in the frontal lobe - and that's where it's occupied.
The Bell brothers are fundamentally not fundamental and their talents for chimes and loops, which create a steady state of rhythm and rolling but could never give off any motion sickness, are seemingly endless. There is blissfulness and there is bluster that - if you wanted to save money on your winter utility bills - could be used to heat your entire house. It's a warm blaze that they entice from the melodies and ideas that they so carefully put together. It provided a montage for this particular day, spent scurrying about, through the dirty and slushy brown snow, completing some last-minute shopping and it didn't seem out of place. It played as the car lived. It played as we moved together through the boxes of vinyl record albums at the record store, spying rare Hendrix and Band bootleg live albums for $125 more than should be spent on them. It played as the meter was fed a dime for a few minutes of time and then continued as we moved through an antique store that smelled of the dreadlocked mutt that called it home. It smelled of the ancient glass and the dusty light fixtures - all of the stuff that needed to be scrubbed clean. The rooms were cool because of the open door in the back that led to a pebble-floored room of scary photographs, old Playboys and furniture that people might have died in and Lymbyc Systym fit in with the parlor and the pallor, giving everything that the eyes spotted a specific texture that suited it.
Lymbyc Systym Official Site
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