|
“I started recording The Banishing at much the same time as my previous album, Hip To The Jag was released, which was essentially at the beginning of lockdown in Spring 2020” relates Kavus. ”The original intent had been to make a record that was not as obviously personal and autobiographical as the first. I wanted to make a positive, uplifting album.”
“The following two years saw what I can only describe as a descent into psychosis. My relationship with my family broke down and became completely dysfunctional and it became necessary for me to leave our home and ultimately London, where I had lived for the previous thirty years.”
These had been three decades that had seen Kavus develop a reputation as a psychedelic polymath – a mercurial figure with a voracious appetite for new creative adventures whose energies always seemed ready to expand in myriad directions at any given time. Moving to to the capital in the early ‘90s, he initially focused on spreading polymorphous audial delights via The Monsoon Bassoon, before – as if by some form of destiny – joining his favourite band Cardiacs in 2003 and playing with them until the tragic circumstances befalling the band’s visionary Tim Smith led to the band’s premature retirement in 2008.
More recently, his songwriting found an outlet in the psychotropic ensemble Knifeworld, and a blossoming DJ partnership with snooker champion and renowned musical renaissance man Steve Davis led to an invitation from Daevid Allen to lead Gong into new 21st century dimensions with their original spirit intact, as well the hallucinatory improvisational project The Utopia Strong with both Davis and Mike York (Coil, Current 93)
Yet throughout his storied journey, his muse has remained intact – an ever-expanding and kaleidoscopic meld of rich melody and surreal rhythmic constructs that joins the cosmic dots between the psychedelic legacies of Syd Barrett, Robyn Hitchcock and his former bandmate Tim whilst escorting them somewhere freshly invigorating and entirely his own.
The Banishing was however more than merely a chance to offer a glimpse at these creative sparks in their most vivid form, and over the course of the last few years took on the form of nothing less than a mission of personal catharsis.
|
