Gaf & The Love Supreme Arkestra - Retiro Espiritual (Keroxen) [Jazz]
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's August 16th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
GAF & The Love Supreme Arkestra are a “psychedelic, experimental, space rock music collective based in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain”, who have also been playing and recording under the Gaf y la Estrella de la Muerte moniker for the last twenty-five years. If you want to go down an Iberian/southern European experimental music wormhole, then click a few of the links on their website. You might discover the Keroxen crew, who are keeping the Canary Islands’ experimental music scene alive and vibrant; perhaps you’ll discover the Edge Project, which in turn leads to the Azores for one of the most intriguing music festivals I know and one of the few still on my agenda to attend, or maybe over to Cyprus for this intriguing, new-to-me event. The internet isn’t all just big tech and advertising and still has a bit of its early wonder if you’re not too jaded by Google’s present search results shit show and the major apps these days to explore it.
So what of the music? It's as winding, interconnected, tangential and out there as the above paragraph. It’s also great. Think free-flowing jazz-led genre fluidity meets spiritual psychedelic wonder guided by grooving, ritualist, hypnotic rhythms. It’s gentle but forceful when it needs to be. It’s acoustic and electronic, searching, questioning and curious. If you are too, then hit play on the music, and perhaps follow a few of the links above, then look for similar music and events in your area and support them before modern music becomes as depressing as today’s internet.
If you need a bit more encouragement to support GAF and other little guys, here’s a bit more food for thought. There is a vinyl run of the album, I’m guessing 200 or 300 copies for the whole world, which is priced at an altruistic €18 - half the price of most new albums. If you look on the Bandcamp page, the album has sold four copies. If you head over to the album’s Spotify page, the first track got just over 1000 plays in its first month, which means Spotify will pay the band the $3.50 for those streams. Because the other four tracks didn’t break 1000 streams in the first month, Spotify won’t pay the group, but instead redirect that money to more popular, mostly major label artists. If the tracks then break a thousand streams over the couse of a year Spotify will pay them, minus the streams from the first month. This is their “artist-centric” payment model, and it’s heartbreaking. This is amazing music, and the artists deserve so much better.
If this sort of wide-ranging, open-minded jazz is hitting your sweet spot, then you might want to check out the little known prepare thyself's void jazz album.
Playlist Companion
Find GAF in the Slow Jazz Playlist.
