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Friday Full-Length: Causa Sui, Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3

Causa Sui, Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3 (2009)

I’m perfectly willing to go on-record and tell you that summer is far from my favorite season of the year, and as the news comes out that July 2015 was the hottest month the planet has experienced since they started keeping track, and as it’s humid enough out today for me to feel like I could swim to my busted-ass-AC-having car, I believe it. Here on the East Coast of the US, the perma-haze has settled in, and it we’re at that stage of summer where it feels like it’s never going to end and the world is just trying to cook us off its surface. You want pleasant? Wait until spring or fall. The only thing that awaits you outside today is sun-baked death. I mean that.

Still, just because that happens to be my experience and my opinion does not at all make it universal. In listening to Causa Sui‘s Summer Sessions series, I can only marvel at what must have been a very, very good season in their eyes. Released in three volumes on Elektrohasch Schallplatten as separate limited LPs between 2008 and 2009 and subsequently collected as Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3 on CD and vinyl, Summer Sessions remains a consuming meisterwerk precisely because it manages to capture the warmth and dreamy sensibility so often associated with the hot months of the year, the Danish four-piece of Jakob Skøtt, Jonas Munk, Rasmus Rasmussen and Jess Kahr finding a balance between classic progressive and heavy psychedelic rocks that not only showcased the live chemistry they were (and still are) able to bring to the studio, but pushed far beyond what they’d been able to accomplish on their self-titled 2005 debut (on Nasoni) or its 2007 follow-up, Free Ride. I won’t take anything away from either of those — except perhaps to say the first album has proven a pain in the ass to find on CD; when something on Nasoni is gone, it’s really gone — but clearly the scope on Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3 is in a different league entirely. Two hours of rich, explorational jamming, lush and vibrant. It’s a pretty high standard to meet.

And I think Causa Sui took some pretty significant lessons from Summer Sessions in their recording process for their 2013 full-length, Euporie Tide, upon which much due praise has been heaped. They’re currently working on their next outing that will probably be out early next year, and as they get farther away from Summer Sessions, it should be interesting to hear what they come up with and how they move forward past Euporie Tide, but whatever that album holds, the ultra-immersive sun-shining brilliance of Summer Sessions continues to stand on its own. It’s almost enough to make one tolerate the heat.

A triple album. I guess between posting that Shiggajon stream — that album being released on Causa Sui‘s label, El Paraiso Records — and posting about Swallow the Sun‘s triple album to be released in November today, it’s easy enough to see how I might have arrived at closing out the week with Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3. No regrets, in any case.

I put word out yesterday on Thee Facebooks and didn’t post anything here mostly because I wanted to sort of make it a soft announcement rather than a big thing, but I’ll be hosting an all-dayer next August at the Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn. The date is Aug. 20, 2016. It’s a Saturday. My plan is to have bands start around 2 or 3PM, go until a bit before midnight and then basically just make it a party. I have a headliner confirmed about whom I’m very stoked and several others locked in and am looking into other acts. Seven bands total. Several people have reached out from around the world to say they’re interested in coming, and that support means very, very much to me. Would be awesome to sell the place out.

Anyway, actual, official-type announcements will start after the New Year, so keep an eye out. I’m stoked though.

My brain must be absolutely fried, because I don’t even know how fried my brain is. I took the day off from work — which is, apparently, a thing one can do? — to take The Patient Mrs. for an endoscopy as her bizarre food-allergy saga continues, and I had some stuff going on this morning as well, including an interview with Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet about their new release. Look at me, doing interviews. It’s been a while.

That’ll be posted sometime in the next week or two, and next week I’ve also got reviews of the new Pentagram and Thera Roya releases slated, a full-album stream for Carousel‘s new one on Wednesday, a track stream on Tuesday for a band called Mountain Movers from Connecticut and another one maybe Thursday that I shouldn’t really talk about yet. Might do a podcast for Monday as well, since we’re about due. Depends on time, which as always, is short. I’m back and forth between Connecticut and New Hampshire for the next two days — because, you know, self-cruelty — and so by the time Monday gets around that 90 minutes to work in the morning should seem like a break.

Please have a great and safe weekend, and please check out the forum and the radio stream.

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One Response to “Friday Full-Length: Causa Sui, Summer Sessions Vol. 1-3

  1. BD says:

    You’re the man, JJ. keep on keeping on.

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