A Sweet Rendezvous of Imagination and Reason on Jupiter 13 / Steve Kilbey & Martin Kennedy

I don’t like the word “psychedelic” and its commonplace, fashionable use in matters of music. I’m sure it’s useful to describe certain types of music, but it’s just too easy and falls short of the endless, innate qualities of music itself… And in the case of Jupiter 13 “psychedelic” just won’t do. Yet, I see it being used in many a review of this beautiful wholeness of an album of such incredible lucidness and clarity, like a white or yellow moon against dark skies.You’d think I‘d have a problem then perhaps with this music so unfortunately categorised by that label, but I don’t, quite the contrary… This album strives for a wholesome unity of all that seems contradictory. Is there a better way in which to imagine the comfort of unity than in music, I wonder? Kilbey and Kennedy have tried to repair the brokenness of a world lying bare in shatters. They want to retrieve and reconstruct in music what was lost, through the perfect mingling of voices and instruments in a mix of imagination and rationality transferred to a place beyond the reality we know. Jupiter 13 feels like the providential combination of Kubrick’s rational tale of manmade instruments, evolving into sci-fi technology, eventually taking over command, and Bowie’s account of his sensitive hero Major Tom lost in space. And ultimately an ode to the tremendous powers and broad, expansive nature of music itself.

The music and lyrics hold a delicate balance between dreamy imagination and intelligent reasoning as if the music instruments with their planetary circling sounds and rhythms see a way out, a possibility of a new world; the moment the music escapes from the instrument it seems no longer bound by any restrictions of matter or physical laws and who else knows better how to deal with this in words climbing into imaginative spaces alongside the music, than Steve Kilbey?

In the first song of the album with the gorgeously adamant title “Adsr”, Steve Kilbey is already right on the money writing another one of his delphian opening lines “Your life is a piece of music”. Listening on, discovering this exceptional poem of the metaphorical intertwining of music and the flux of our life, I shook my head in disbelief of such beauty caught in these lines; especially the last stanza is, well, it seemed like… Furthermore I need to add that the prosody of the lyricist throughout the whole album is just out of this world; its interplay with the fabulous music of Martin Kennedy is truly insanely spellbinding! These two were made for each other.

Rendezvous is simply set up as a sequence of moments of cosmic beauty emerging in a secretive meeting hollowed out of the most profound layers and crevices of musical geology: “You always said the best was yet to come”, the voices of Steve Kilbey and Leona Gray expressing the hopeful advent of unity and happiness in an endlessly spread out musical universe, how do the inclinations of these soft voices make these words so poignant? And then the voices fall into this clearing filled with honeyed light, “The road to hell, I gotta tell you, is nearly almost under reconstruction”, like a sudden epiphany that shines through the music, an unwonted, exceptional instance of singular beauty. It makes you wonder what is the secret of those melodies ringing through the air, through space…? Almost touching and grasping infinity, an infinite world of possibilities, of an asymptotic closeness to the aspirations of the soul. The openness of the universe, that’s what music seems to reach out for most of all. Where a 1950’s kitchen is just a part of the universe’s eternal present. Jupiter 13 is like a metaphor for escape and renewal, rebirth.

The title song “Jupiter 13” captures this vastness in a visionary epic of exploration and understanding, danger and solace, a musical adventure through the unknown which culminates in a most unusual climax of subtlety and waves of questions flowing back and forth in the sagacious, silken piano solo of Stefan Horlitz, music in a state of limbo, of not knowing, of hesitation, the beauty of the search for truth or for mere answers, the wonder of musical ways of traveling through the universe, a laudation of the possibilities of the unknown. Oh! Let it never be revealed, the mystery of it all, or music would lose its purpose. Let the music prolong the mystery forevermore.

“Insane” starts off with one of the most sane and poised melodies possible under our skies, the music guiding and lending the voices a fervour and resilience to resurrect again and again, to withstand any attempt of submission. Music as a threshold of sanity built along the repetitiveness of a prayer. These constructions of music and words are just so meaningful, insightful, revealing the building blocks of the human soul wading through this world of mysteries.

And just when you think things couldn’t get more beautiful, “Holiday” sneaks in, quietly. Peacefully. A serene memory of happy days and nights on Earth. A guitar and a voice can have this sublime power of saying: why do you look so far? “It must have been a holiday”, a story of a you and a me on Earth, harmonised into a blissful memory by the muse of all muses and she sings “It must have been a holiday”, a soft reverberation of happiness gone by, still lingering around somewhere in the immensity that surrounds us. Sand and weeds, a caravan…A transcendent sketch of desolate beauty so intensely felt. Unsurpassable!

And oh the beautiful unfolding of the idea of a world that was waiting for us all the time, a world that was and had always been there in the freedom of the open skies…in “No Attachment”, a hand always showing us the way, leading us… the hand of music at work in another stunning song of truth, the hand of music allegorised in a sublime acoustic guitar solo of divine loneliness by Gareth Koch, which together with the piano solo of Stefan Horlitz on the title song makes for one of the most tenderly poignant, introspective and intense moments of beauty on this album. Listen to how it all started… to the beginning… of this song and of everything else… everything forever freely commencing anew in a universe where energy equals presence equals love.

These men and women show us how intimately connected Music and Universe ultimately are and Man and Woman the privileged observers of it all. Music as a wilderness of history and fiction progressing with the beat of primitive drums, under the spell of the lingering and changing shapes of the sounds of a synthesizer in a place called “Aetolia”. Come to think of it, our inner world is not so different, the same jungle of history and fiction…

I’ll end with the song “Halfway”, which expresses effortlessly what this album is all about: the game of balancing out the extremes in all that we encounter on our path. Finding ourselves somewhere halfway in between seems like the wisest thing to do, as all great philosophers already knew… The adventure of music is just like the adventure of life, an act halfway between cowardliness and recklessness, named courage, the braveness of discovery governed by both reason and imagination which led to this heavenly equilibrium that is to become Jupiter 13. Perhaps it is not there yet, but it pre-exists in music, the realm in which all that is possible can be expressed in the most natural, compassionate and complete way…

I’d like to meet the orchestra. Can it be arranged?

I just can’t believe the immense, emotional and wise beauty of it all, so happy that this album from now on will be a part of my life. — with Steve Kilbey and Martin Kennedy.

Joke Roelandt, March 2021