“The second of two in a row from John Cage’s rather intense Sabotage/Live is a sailor’s tale of sorts. It starts as an instrumental meander perhaps evoking unsettled seas, then gets deadly serious as the singing creeps in. No, I don’t think Peter Pan’s involved, unless he’s the one that slipped the laudanum into the Captain’s rum. For a fever dream it is, apparently driven by the evils British Colonial India. The journey is long, with treasures along the way, madness at the end.” (Philip Random)
“This first showed up in my life on a homemade cassette somebody gave me subtitled International Never Never Zen, because to write down all the twelve tracks jammed into side one of Todd Rundgren‘s A Wizard, A True Star would be to induce writer’s cramp, I guess. And it all flows together as one anyway, or certainly tries to. Because this stuff is nothing if not mad (as opposed to insane), overblown and over-reaching in the best possible way, jamming tape experiments up against instrumental freakouts, recurring themes, a cover of a Peter Pan song (from the Broadway play) and at least one proper standalone epic (concerning a Zen Archer) … and overall, just wow. Not perfect at all, but what do you expect from a guy who had recently given up on his straight edge lifestyle to more or less embrace everything from cannabis to DMT, magic mushrooms, peyote, even Ritalin … all toward abstracting his creative process in such a way that the music ultimately flowed out of him like a painting, spilling directly from his brain and/or soul onto the metaphorical canvas of our ears. Or something like that.” (PR)
