Alex Homan comes at it this time around from beyond
the shimmering double vision of harmonic transcendence. Not surprisingly, Saga Dawa a Tibetan month of the lunar
calendar, the “month of merits,” which celebrates the birth of the Buddha. This
Plake tape does a little bit of celebrating if you ask me – whether Buddha or
otherwise, Homan is at the forefront of celebrating life and people through
music. He usually drops a little note on his j-cards, and this one says, “May
all beings benefit by any and all virtues.” I like the way this guy thinks.
Saga Dawa thus
comes across as a prayer to the cosmos, filtering experimental Animal
Collective–style jams with
Beach Boys-y melodicism, an essentially redundant descriptor as “Animal
Collective–style jams” kind
of implies that. It’s all there, the campfire guitar and violin, the off-kilter
psilocybin-informed rhythm, the chaotic post-production swirling around the
songs’ core. It shifts from lo-fi to reg.-fi with ease, even popping into hi-fi
once in a while (“Floating Island” anyone?). But the charm is in Homan’s
utterly restless experimentalism – there’s no way this tape (or his work in
general) should sound so disparate yet so obviously be made by the same person.
Homan sings to you in such a companionable way, but he doesn’t think you’re
stupid – he knows you can handle what he’s got cooking.
Which is another thing this tape has going for it,
which makes it so approachable – its communality. You just want to sit around
it with other people and listen to it all the way through. It doesn’t repeat
itself – Alex Homan is too full of ideas to let a tape of his do something like
that. It’s thrillingly all over the place, and you’ll never find yourself in
the midst of a dull moment. In fact, you’ll probably want to go through it a
second time right away because you’ll miss a lot the first time, trust me.
Endless Easter eggs await.
https://alexhoman.bandcamp.com/
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