Quite an eve for the celestial.

Ariadnes' got frozen feet, Lysios' defrosting his chariot and Zeuses' shaking icicles from his horns. Tonight, the Gods are tobogganing and building deitific snowmen somewhere up there in that burgeoning billow of asphaltine sky. The sky, the rolling sky, well her belly is full and she rumbles and guffaws; a flatulent behemoth in the heavens. Myself, I feel… I feel like a groaning river barcarole, rhythms delirious and yawning. A pacing cougar without the cage. Convoluted, restless, insatiable.

Inside, the auditorium swirls with a spectral ripple of voices, nerdite students cluck empty banalities, dronerock existentialists ruminate behind hooded lids and burnt-out souls. The support act, gruffly Grand Transmitter, create a comber, a glittering swell of minor key-laden clamour, a reedy wall that washes with an aural spume and an abstinence not seen since the Gazers of Shoes moped on cobblestone and Barnados. In this Chapterhouse sat folk who witnessed the nuclei of, *ahem*, David Gray amalgamate into the megacosm. The ‘bowl-cut’, mercifully, is not in attendance.

And neither am I, in many ways, I’m off into the mid-distance, rapt in the soft lights, waiting for something, something knowing, moving in this green night. Voices evaporate, lights fade and glasses clink down into the desolate chime of yachts in mooring. Seven skeletons move out onto the stage into a silent reverential, a solemn clap, a telling nod or a dark cheer. Spiritualized mount their white mare. The Spaceman Pierce ascends the bridle last, stealing, a shadow, into his stageside seat. Static calm ignites. Electricity, electricity, electricity – just like that, in cadence, in poetry, and then… ‘Electricity’; one full scale austere assault on the senses. Synapses char and irises raze in brilliant pain as lasers dance and sear through the crowd’s contracting membrane, the collective pulse. The universe is under siege. Eardrums perforate. The skeletons on stage dissolve into sonorous decibelia, wax and blood, then radiate an unremitting tide of gamma and silver rain. Guitars and bleach. This is where my journey begins…

I close my eyes. I shut them tight into my lashes and pray for something that doesn’t, that cannot exist. I sense the demons that lie in the floor of my soul recoil as I face them for the first time, brandishing a glowing beacon, a light in the dark. The figures on podium move harmoniously, unfaltering, ritualistic… silhouetted, junk zephyrs, against a mist of pink rosettes flowing within a gentle kaleidoscope, a technicians hand, a lightshow for the conundrum and sadness of humanity. I’m ‘Walking with Jesus’. A harmonica mourns in my inner ear. Instrument and body fuse together as mercurial mop and strings sluice with the very essence of these men, the lifeblood of these people, dying and being re-born in milliseconds for this, their art, their Gospel, their existence.

And it is now, as I lift my head into the rafters of the hall, as my friend’s knuckles crunch white into his palms, as I stand in the face of a galactic drift, as archipelagos of keys and writhing jagmaster bathe me like deep space being sucked in and blown back in my face, it is now, as ‘Anything more’ smoulders into its auditory cataclysm, that I fully comprehend what this is. It has traversed pop culture by light years. It has shaken its shackles. It knows how it feels to be free. It is singing for the sake of singing. I watch Jason, I study the nullity in his face; an uninflected expression is merely his entrapment in this world, and this, the sounds – it’s his nightly redemption. His burden is our burden, his salvation, our salvation.

‘Let it flow’ encapsulates the everything in this evening. It is the sound of the supervivere; the world weary, the miner at the end of the tunnel looking out onto a land he hasn’t seen for weeks, the junk addict feeling fresh air on his face as he opens the window into his terrace courtyard. It is for the people who have seen what lies beneath, who have all the sadness, joys, loves, losses, heartbreak, jubilation and crushing defeat scratched into their slate, shaped as tableau, infused within their journey… and they wouldn’t change a thing. As I drink from this choral ocean, this shimmering empyrean of bells and cathedralia, lost within myself, I momentarily drift into the black. I see a baby propelled from the womb into its afterbirth and ascetic white lights. I see a gaunt figure crawling into a foetal position, syringe still sticking from its arm. I can see the daylight in their eyes.

Songs are unbroken, a quiet hum of feedback connects them, umbilically, together. 'Amazing Grace' tussles with 'Lazer Guided Melodies' and 'Pure Phase' for stage space. Time is ideology. I am standing on the edge of the world, as the voice, that lonely, lonely voice unravels a mind so convoluted and impure, as it nurtures a new rose from between two ‘Broken heart(s)’ and as it soothes an ache, a perpetual ache. Harmonica sings from the mind. Rimshots and symbals twinkle into glacial constellations. ‘Take good care of it’, this voice descants; an elegy to precious, precious life. A testimony to fragile beauty and trust. The still of lovers holding hands beneath the sheets, listening for each heartbeat, afraid of the pause, yearning for each other even though they are mere inches apart. This voice speaks to me from a man who has been pulled from the abyss more times than he cares to count, and it is only now that I realise that I am crying, cold tear on cold cheek, in an affirmation of being, and everything that it entails. Through squalls of interstellar guitar, pounding drums and electronic ripples, I am struck by one paramount, consuming thought – we have nothing, and we have nothing to lose…

The seven skeletons are thrashing the life from their instruments now, rocketing past the decibel registry of human hearing in one collosal spacejam. A single bead of sweat rolls from Jason’s aquiline brow, his feet stomp the earth and his hands are a blur over the fretboard as he pulls ghostly harmonics and feedback tempests in one motion. It is a phenomenal noise, the roar of a great crowd, screaming oblivion, fuses blowing at the world in an exultation, a flock of doves flying free into the new dawn. Crippled souls no longer torture themselves in silence, for they have been spoken for.

"That was the most psychedelic trip I’ve ever been on," my friend declares, as we sit down on a bench outside in the cold.

Myself, well, I’m just a little deaf now.