Black Fiction

Nurturing and bolstering creativity with the dark strings of fear and phobia is the shortest distance between here and letting the mirages move their own parts, touching you on the arms and swiping eerily against your legs and feet, like a squid or an octopus that wants something. Things can get scary pretty quickly too, but the converse of the Great Frightening is an experience that is loosely based on the one that can be achieved through the experimental use of copious amounts of narcotics. To allow the projections of the delirious ramblings of the mind to shine like golden yellow flickers here and there, giving them solos and monologues in certain choice places, is a munificent, beauteous bounty of acceptable warping.

San Francisco's Black Fiction makes music that could, if it wanted to, keep at least one foot in the backyard of sanity, but as we do when the nights close in, it can't help what the dreaming eyes or the wretched ones see when there's a choice to be had. The songs on last year's impossibly fantastic Ghost Ride were laden with the bumps in the night, spacey beats and lead singer Tim Cohen's magical and fascinating voice and lyrics, which could hold hundreds of different meanings in their vast catacombs full of question marks and ellipses. It's not unfathomable that it was written and treated in the throes of insomnia-induced episodes of suspended reality, where the head feels unhinged and the things that come out of its top, the ears, the eyes and the mouth are all examples of corralled dementia. There are mysteries and unexplainable potions at work and Cohen favors making the most potent concoctions the most attractive and aromatic.

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