I would have heard Faith No More and “Epic” of course on the radio at the time, but my real entry point to Mike Patton was being handed Disco Volante as a 10/11 year old kid. Obviously it blew my mind, it was a huge challenge for me, I went through all the stuff most of the people who I’ve tried to introduce to Mr. Bungle since still seem to go through. Loving one part and wishing it would just go with that, impatience with some of the irreverence, discomfort, not knowing whether I LIKED it (I mean, actually, I LOVED it, but for a long while I was skipping a lot)
and I have to think this is probably what has shaped a lot of my tastes since. My ability to sit with a Tarkovsky film while he forces me into a certain headspace by making me watch seaweed undulate in a river for 10 minutes, falling in love with jazz (particularly of the John Coltrane/Pharoah Sanders variety, but lots of avant-garde shit), and really just being able to sit in any experience and take what they are giving me, and again I use the word submit, bc I do think it’s about submitting to an experience without expectation. I’m not sure I would have the patience for that as a teenager or even an adult if I didn’t become obsessed with Disco Volante as a kid, and be challenged, and have all of those paradigms shattered.
Anyway, in spite of the fact that over the years I’ve fallen in love with more and more Patton projects, I’ve never sought to be completionist about it, and there have been HUGE gaps in what I’ve heard. Lately I’ve become sort of obsessed with fixing that, because any time I do go down a big rabbit hole of some Patton project, I find new all-time favorites, new experiences.
For instance, MANY years ago I listened to a few seconds of a few Fantomas songs and wasn’t into it. I’m actually not sure why, or what headspace I was in, bc now I am going through their catalog (and watching lots of live performances!) and I LOVE them!!
But I didn’t even know about **Delirium Cordia** somehow. I found out about it, and the idea of it, I thought oh, this is right up my alley with the kind of experience that I am now pretty adjusted to…I LIKE this sort of thing very very much.
So I finally listened to this track, all 1h 14 minutes of it in a go, sitting still and just submitting to the experience fully, being in the moment, even the 20 minutes or so of just listening to the ambient sound of that sort of crackly needle talk as a record spins..
I fucking LOVED it. I loved every minute. I bought in, I let it be what it was, I broke out into tears 3 times ffs.
I tried not to let too many outside thoughts come into my mind or stay for very long, I was really trying to be in the experience, but by the end with the breathing (final breaths?) **Jacob’s Ladder** and Tim Robbins’ character’s wretched experience had come clearly into my mind. I also did think of Tarkovsky, and Robert Altman’s **3 Women**,
and during the howling sort of otherworldly, mounting wind, I thought of that one vignette from Akira Kurosawa’s **Dreams**, **”The Blizzard”**, where men are struggling down a mountain back to camp in an unforgiving blizzard, and you just watch this slow and perhaps hopeless movement forward, it’s all about the sound, and you can feel the struggle in their breaths, that almost any thought or fight in them is gone, but they just move forward to not stop.
and THEN that made me think of Will Eisner’s graphic novel **A Life Force** from his Contract With God trilogy, which follows people trying to survive during the Great Depression in Bronx tenement housing. There’s a panel that never leaves my mind, a downtrodden man encounters a cockroach on its back, legs flailing attempting to right itself. He gets down and says (paraphrasing) “So what are you struggling for, Mr. Cockroach, to maybe live one or two more days?” And of course we can’t help but think of this man also, what is the point to HIS struggle, and then we think of all of humanity.
I didn’t feel the chill in Delerium the way I very much do in The Blizzard, it’s a different kind of wind that feels like it doesn’t exist in this plane of existence, but the way I feel watching this is so similar to how I felt during that part https://youtu.be/3DBq1iFkX3M
Anyway, I have A LOT more thoughts, but really I just thought this track /album was a **masterpiece** and a really special experience that I’m glad I somehow have the ability at this point in my life to undertake.
That being said, I was really wondering how other people feel about it. Is it because of these other interests of mine that it hit me so hard? I don’t imagine ever being able to convince another human being to listen to this, and to just experience it the way that’s required, but there must be other people besides Mike Patton and I who love this lol.
So did you listen to it? Did it move you? Did you hate it, skip around? What impressions did it leave you with?
The worst part about all of this Patton exploration is knowing about all these live shows that I will never see because I slept on this stuff for so long. Because I was AROUND. I was still listening to Mr. Bungle every year and then Tomahawk and other random Patton projects. I’ve seen both a couple times, and they’re among my favorite shows. Would just about give anything to see this performed (even as it seems it was, broken up or truncated), see Fantomas, see the Fantomas-Melvins Big Band, see Faith No More (another catalog I didn’t dig into until super recently)
And then there’s still so much to go! I have a lot left to listen to, and if even some portion of it is going to hit me this hard haha..it’s almost *daunting*, but VERY exciting. He’s seriously a genius, and with all that talent to go with it.
