As the tumultuous year that was 2020 comes finally to an end, this is an opportunity to return to a pleasurable task that I had meant to undertake just as the first COVID-related lockdown was taking hold. In April, the art-rock group, Phaze Theory, had released an album and concert video, Live at Balabam, which brought together their love of esoterica, W. B. Yeats and William Blake.
Based in London, the group was founded in 2014 by Christopher Barrett (on tuba), Tal Janes (guitar) and Marco Quarantotto (drums), and released their first album, Phaze Theory, in 2017. While that album owed more to Yeats (with tracks that included "Song of the Wandering Aengus" and "Dialogue of Self and Soul") it also included an astonishing burst of Blakeana in the form of "The Angel", in which Barrett's ominous blasts create a disturbing vortex from which bursts Janes' jazz guitar and Ray Jones wonderful vocals. It was exciting, dynamic and truly beautiful.
A year later, the group - now joined by singer Irini Arabatzi - had gathered at the Balabam music venue in Tottenham, an event which would be recorded as their new album. Again comprising a mixture of occultural-inspired songs, some of which Phaze Theory had already played at other clubs such as the Vortex and Bird's Nest, this album brings together a wider selection of Blake's songs, most notably The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, as well as How Sweet I Roam'd from the Poetical Sketches (and for the inclusion of which I might have been partially responsible...)
The live album begins with a somewhat more laid-back, slightly melancholy feel on "Into the Twilight" which perfectly matches the mournful sense of Yeats's poem from The Wind Among the Reeds, with Arabatzi's vocals perfectly complementing the mellow harmonies of the three musicians. By contrast, "The Little Girl Lost" marks a significant transition towards the art-occult forms that the band like to explore, using free jazz forms to break away from tonal chord progressions and instead evoke Blake's Song of Experience as a mysterious search of the soul among caverns deep and beasts of prey. Its companion piece, "The Little Girl Found", focusses on Janes's guitar and Arabatzi's voice to create a harmonious resolution - Lyra returned to her parents as the soul returns to its home.
"The Little Girl Found" is beautiful, but my personal soft spot remains "How Sweet I Roam'd". Published in Blake's first collection, Poetical Sketches, in 1784, it is one of his most perfectly lyrical songs and has been frequently been set to music, beginning with Henry Balfour Gardner in 1895 and most famously by The Fugs on the 1970 album, Golden Filth. Although it has been a popular poem for different musicians and groups, Phaze Theory make the song entirely their own - a mystical, dreamy vision of a lost Spring in which melodious voice and instruments hover within harmonies while lilting away into slight dissonances that match perfectly the underlying discord of Blake's original poem (and, it must be said, which segue perfectly into the next track, Mohini Chatterjee).
Phaze Theory have been described as a combination of Miles Davies, Led Zeppelin and William Blake (which very much underestimates the importance of Yeats at least). Live at Balabam certainly shows them as inheritors of Blake's musical mantle - and is a reminder of happier times for live performances and a hope that it will not be too much longer before we can see them again.
You can hear Live at Balabam on Spotify and support them by downloading from their web site. Some of the live recordings from the concert can be seen on YouTube.