Concert Review: Zen Mother Ascend At Baby’s All Right
Zen Mother are weird, strange, warped, and completely serene about it. At Baby’s All Right, they were a Twilight Zone of mindfulness; tensing chords of serenity as if to sonically prove that chaos is calm. In a world that believes rules are protection, norms are civilizing, and levels are necessary, zen mother sing/play to a contrast.
Imagine a world with no laws or castes organizing people according to labels such as, gender or race. Could you picture it? Now I’m not trying to make you a John Lennon, but it would be nice to be able to fathom such a world and play piano with little glasses. Playing some tracks from their most recent record,The Ascent: Music Inspired by The Holy Mountain and I Was Made To Be Like Her, it seems like Zen Mother do have such a psychedelic vision. Their songs felt as if Lord of The Flies and Westworld decided to combine and perform a literary exodus to Dune. Yeah….. They turned their instruments into ambient machines; bolting nails into your imagination and then draping colorful ideas from them.
If the latter does not seem imaginable as a sound or performance then A) click the youtube video above and B) go see their next tour. Monika Knot has a voice that feels like holy wine that has been spilled; she sings her notes like they are sacred and corrupted. She threads emotionality as if each note was stringed with teeth; once again, I am using these images because The Holy Mountain is a phenomenal film that matches with Zen Mother’s MO. Its themes of materiality, spirituality, and how both clash melodically fused with the Seattle Band’s style, and made you feel rested into their cinematic soundscapes.
The best way I can describe Zen Mother’s concert/ sound effects is a VR station. You go and put on the goggles (or rather let Monika and Wolcott Smith jam out) and see what you see. Frankly, it is unsurprising their chill personalities breed scum music; they are visionaries trying to represent and push music and their generation to not dream bigger but dream newer. For More Information On Zen Mother Click Here.
