Viles Album

Arguably, some of the most potent ravaged music of the last half-century has come out of sunny California. "Light reveals shadows" and nowhere is this more evident than in schizophrenic San Francisco; where a "free-spirited, open, progressiveness" has always lived alongside total depravity--wealth, drugs, culture and claustrophobia lend the city (and this S.F. recorded album) a sense of ominous urgency. However, Jealousy maintains that it's debut album √iles is not a sketch of the dark. "This is a luminescent map from an avid lamp collector," insisting on being, "Hell-bent towards perfect light." The metaphor is necessary yet istered casually. Jealousy models it's presentation on the Dream Machine; a free hanging light bulb in a rotating perforated cylinder totem which corresponds with the brain's alpha-waves producing a "drugless high". Invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in the early 60s (popularized with the help of William S. Burroughs) for it's hallucinogenic effects induced by it's rhythmic pulsing of light. Dream-machine methods are often employed in Jealousy recordings and performances, the music itself, a Nachtmusik rendering of the dream-machine experience; for a systematic derangement of the senses. There is also an obsession with language and its striking delivery; spiritual second-cousin to eternal rock + roll poet laureates such as Jim Carroll and Genesis P.Orridge (or even fellow Californian Jim Morrison, without his messianic imperative); the voice of Jealousy is intoxicated and dissolute. "Music consumed by street lust", he says, by way of introduction, explaining right off the bat that he's come for our sons and daughters. "I'll feed them with a copper spoon," slurring, slyly; "And teach them ecstasy." Which he proceeds to do--surgically ambiguous--for the duration of the album, offering up anthems of drug sores dedicated to corrupted outcasts and wheelchair pharmacists, doctoring the city's lost children, before a malignant psychedelia is istered as a commercial last-ditch inoculation.