Cavern Deep Premiere Philip Glass Cover “Koyaanisqatsi” in New Video
Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 11th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
The Philip Glass piece ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ takes its name from the Hopi language and translates as ‘life out of balance.’ Fair enough, and certainly more erudite than the modern English equivalent, which would probably just be ‘fucked up’ because we actually live in Idiocracy.
Speaking of classic filmmaking, “Koyaanisqatsi” was first featured on the no-words-just-images-and-music 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance by Godfrey Reggio (who turned it into a trilogy), and in addition to being covered by Cows previously and featuring on The Simpsons apparently also showed up on season four of Stranger Things. Thanks, Wikipedia. So needless to say, the piece has had a fascinating life, and that continues as the Umeå, Sweden-based Cavern Deep offer their interpretation via the live video premiering below.
It’s now been over a year since Cavern Deep announced they’d finished recording their second album less than a month after the release of their self-titled debut (review here). They’d already by then proceeded through a series of videos similar to this one playing the album tracks front to back, and later last year they’d unveil a cover of Frank Zappa‘s “Muffin Man” (posted here) and an instrumental single “L B & M,” and they’ve continued writing even as there’s reportedly another original single that will follow this cover, more besides and the next album, which is apparently completely finished, but most of 2022 seems to have been geared toward getting their act together in terms of live performance; doing shows, in other words. Reasonable if, you know, you want to be a band.
“Koyaanisqatsi” is out Oct. 14 as a standalone single and gives a look at their recording process — guitar, bass, drums basic tracks together in the room, vocals and lead guitar punched in after; the editing makes that smooth in the video — and is a suitably atmospheric work for the band to take on considering what they offered throughout the self-titled. I don’t yet know what’s in store for the follow-up or when it will arrive, but after it seemed like every week of 2021 they had something new come down the wire, I’m glad to hear them put something new out. And that’s it. Simple as that.
The video for “Koyaanisqatsi” is below, followed by comment from the band:
Cavern Deep, “Koyaanisqatsi” video premiere
Max Malmer on “Koyaanisqatsi”:
“We in Cavern Deep have been working a lot behind the curtain lately to get some new music out into the world. Our second album is already mixed and mastered, and we have a lot of interesting single releases in the works as well. One of them features Thomas V. Jäger from Monolord.
So there will be a steady stream of releases from now on and this is the first of them. We have made a cover of “Koyaanisqatsi”, a Philip Glass piece that features in the movie with the same name. Our thinking was to make a cover of a non-Doom song that still Dooms more than any Doom we have ever heard.
Enjoy.”
Cavern Deep is:
Kenny-Oswald Duvfenberg – Guitars and Vocals
Max Malmer – Bass and Vocals
Dennis Sjödin – Drums, Backup Vocals and Keys
Cavern Deep, Cavern Deep (2021)
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