Album Review: Lamp of the Universe, The Cosmic Union (2LP Reissue)
This is not a new album, but it is a new release. Based in Hamilton, New Zealand, the solo-project Lamp of the Universe debuted in the long-ago memory fog of 2001, issuing The Cosmic Union (discussed here) through Cranium Records. The lone figure behind the outing, who has kept the project to himself ever since, was and remains Craig Williamson, who at the time was only two years out from the breakup of his prior band, the more directly riff-rocking and still-prime-for-reissue Datura, and though he might not have guessed it at the time, The Cosmic Union would become the starting point for one of the most engaging progressions in psychedelic music of any stripe.
Through the years since, that’s been true be it the Eastern-informed acid folk represented in this first offering or subsequent adventures in tantric drone, krautrock-style synth and keyboard work, or even more band-style heavy psych rock, all taking place under the umbrella of Lamp of the Universe and the auteurship of Williamson. Also reissued in 2011 through Williamson‘s Astral Projection imprint and through Krauted Mind in 2018, The Cosmic Union finds a ‘definitive’ vinyl incarnation through Greece’s Sound Effect Records, and I won’t even pretend to pretend I’m not happy to have the excuse for a revisit.
From the first strums of acoustic guitar and sitar on “Born in the Rays of the Third Eye” across the vast distance to the tabla-percussed pre-Om meditative sprawl folk of “Tantra Asana” and the subsequent chime-peppered stretch of sitar, chimes, and keyboard-string sounds that cap the record, The Cosmic Union has a patience and a presence unto itself. In its full eight-song/53-minute run — the digital version also includes the bonus track “By the Grace of Love,” not on the vinyl — it does not feel like a minor undertaking, because it isn’t. This was the CD era, and Williamson‘s experimentalist crux in the lysergic, vaguely-Britfolk “Give Yourself to Love,” here the closer of side B on the first LP, and the relative minimalism in the echoing, purposefully-left-open spaces of “Her Cosmic Light” require a conscious engagement.
While it’s never overbearing even in its lushest arrangements, the trade for that is that following Williamson along the album’s complex, universally molten and slowly shifting course can be a challenge for short attention spans. Different listeners will have different experiences; duh. In mine, The Cosmic Union is singular in its beauty and effect on the listener. I’ve chased down records upon records, styles upon styles trying to get some semblance of what comes together so fluidly and naturally in these songs — even some albums recommended by Williamson himself — and I’ve never found one that delivers its vibe with such grace. It is an album that, when heard properly, slows time.
“Born in the Rays of the Third Eye” and “Lotus of a Thousand Petals” brought together and isolated, just the two of them, on side A feels like a landmark, even 21 years after the fact. Those two songs, in almost unassuming fashion, would become touchstones for Lamp of the Universe, and as Williamson moved forward quickly with 2002’s Echo in Light, 2005’s single-song-broken-into-parts long-player, Heru (discussed here), and 2006’s assemblage of mostly longform pieces From the Mystical Rays of Astrological Light, they would remain definitive — there’s that word again — in terms of serving as a primer for the heart of Lamp of the Universe‘s aesthetic project.
Hearing them coupled with side B’s “In the Mystic Light” with its scorching solo work, hand-drumming and one-man jam, and the aforementioned keys-forward twist of “Give Yourself to Love” only emphasizes the point, as well as the breadth that was in Lamp of the Universe from its very beginnings. I’ve tended in recent years to think of Williamson as growing more inclusive of synth and keys with time, and maybe that’s true in terms of adjusting a balance from one element to the next in his composing methods or arrangements, but so much of what Lamp of the Universe has become in the years since is laid out here, or at very least hinted toward, even the bluesy lead rollout and on-a-kit-toms and snare of “Freedom in Your Mind” are prescient, let alone the flowing organ and tambourine that are added later, to fold together on side C with “Her Cosmic Light,” about half as long at 4:12, but resonant just the same in its melodic seeking.
There is not one among the eight songs on The Cosmic Union that doesn’t include the word “love” somewhere in its lyrics. And that’s what the album is. Just as side A sets the foundation for the rest of what unfolds (here and beyond), maybe the strumming circa-1965 George Harrison singer-songwriterism of “What Love Can Bring” and the pushed-farther-out moment when sitar and keys align after the 3:30 mark in “Tantra Asana” on side D are a foundation of their own, if one built in ether. They are united, certainly, as all the material on The Cosmic Union is, by Williamson‘s voice, by their light-touch, inclusive but never overwrought arrangements — that’s a high compliment for an album that has this much sitar and flute and keys, etc. — and by the feeling of love that pervades as the central thematic. As the cover more than hints, The Cosmic Union has a very terrestrial, sometimes downright dirty if you’re lucky, interpretation, but it’s the sharing and proliferation of love that comes through most of all, and if this edition of the album is definitive, it is that love that defines it.
Williamson‘s early-2022 offering, The Akashic Field (review here) — maybe his 13th under the Lamp of the Universe banner — provided hints of what’s to come in 2023 as he moves forward with the heavier as-yet-still-solo band Dead Shrine, whose debut album is impending, but even it was in conversation in some ways with The Cosmic Union, in songs like “Minds of Love” or “Mystic Circle.” This shouldn’t surprise, necessarily, anyone who has charted Williamson‘s progression lo these last two decades, but it does emphasize just how expansive, how inclusive and how crucial The Cosmic Union is. I’ve said before and I’ll say here that on a personal level, this is a record I love. Hearing it again in this new form — new to me, anyhow, since I didn’t have it on vinyl before — it is all the more special for the conversation the material has with itself as well as the surrounding spectra. If you seek healing, this is music that heals.
Lamp of the Universe, The Cosmic Union (2001)
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