schooner: March 5th, 2007 When history has made a full circle, strange things happen, some prophetic and numerological, others are disdained as intricate lies. Both are predictions and yet another method is mathematical, statistical. There are number-meanings that we use to foretell future events and those that we use to define things in the present. schooner in the present moment is statistically young of age, but the core of the band and the thinker of the brainchild is a man with a more ancient history with music. That history with music isn't being counted in days, months, or years, but in the behemoth yet still circumstantial "Era". It is with the molten, magmatic age used in measuring historical "Eras" that we can predict at least part of the future of the band called schooner. For if they escape the chronicles of this age, it is a mistake on the part of the chroniclers and a loss to the exact documentation of history. As a ship, a.k.a. a "schooner" leaves the harbor on a great voyage of discovery, Steve's compositions sail off to unknown lands, both Utopic and Dystopic. The intention, I think is Utopic, but you never know whose ears will capture the sound. His music might be by far the preferred acoustical landscape of psychopaths, and this we will never know, because psychopaths escape history. Though he is not such a one, Steve too has the calculating genius of the psychopathic murderer. But his plight is the creation of beauty which he executes with an untamed freshness of sound. His sound is weathered by time, gathering momentum with the passing, cyclic historical ages of being thrown-in-the-world. The music of schooner, to me, is the sound history makes, or the beautiful forms it takes in its more "abstracted", logical, and "dynamic" performances. The performance we are speaking of is magical and timely. It vacates the emotional, bioelectrical charges accumulated in the "geologic time" of historical sedimentation. Yet it is new and original, fresh as a spring breeze, as they say. This is because real, existential music is still in its infancy. And though these active participants in the era of "the cemented and ceramic music of being" are sailing their ship, i.e. life-enterprise, into new, unknown lands, they are not colonizers. Instead, they are free agents whose sound sculptures interest free agents of choice. schooner is a choice, not a consumer product. It is something like a way of life to the initiate. And in the realm of number-meanings exposed earlier, their numbers are a thousand and one. A thousand for the number of years it takes to create a song of such purposiveness and divine sweetness, and one because, and this may sound cheesy, schooner is number one in my book. It is the choicest meat of the connoisseur but also a torrent of spring-like, natural creationism to the unacclimatized observer. This says something about the universality of the beauty of schooner's sound, and its place distinctly outside the historical. Giant leaps for giant musicians, co-creators of the age of the innate sound of genuine existences. But history all too soon forgets such things. For history is written by the winners or wars, and schooner is a band of losers, unique, creative, and passionate individuals who have abandoned ship in the war for the predominance of routine consumerism. In this sense, they are reminders of anarchy, not the often anal, political vision of anarchism but the superbe realisation of the anarchy of oscillations and distinct wave patterns held together through meticulous orchestration and hard work. In fact, they are not losers at all. All that is lost is the archaic memory of a time when all we cared about was opening Christmas presents. In this sense, schooner is of an unforeseen maturity, i.e. statistically ageless. And once more, if we are to calculate their ordination in numbers, the number is fifty-one. Fifty-one because the scale is just slightly tipping to the side of popularity, which I predict will soon cause the four individuals who make up schooner to jettison everything off the sinking boat in a mad gesture to keep afloat. This will be their perfect act of autonomous existence. But if the ship sinks, it will only find a familiar background of sunken, titanic steel and the hidden manna of pirate treasures. And it is in a process of letting the music "sink in" that is the best way for us to give schooner their chance at success in the industry. Let's remember, even "Puff, the Magic Dragon", as innocuous as it seems, met up with the most violent opposition and iconoclasm in the nineteen-sixties during the big "Drug Lyric Scare".. So schooner should easily find its place in a world now in the twenty-first century where the image is god, because it is the image of timelessness. Just listen for yourselves and be the judges. My prediction is that the scales will tip in the favor of this band in the coming years. One last memento. Perhaps the "image of timelessness" which this band profers up and which I believe makes them truly contemporary can best be exemplified by another metaphor rich in meaning: The desert oasis, Utopic and a sure object of our long-awaited assuagement. It is the long-awaited, timeless image of beauty in a barren, desert landscape. Yet it is a mirage, a magician's act. And schooner is of a mesmerism capable of hypnotizing the world. And the dreamy state that they will surely cause many to fall into is both distraction and ecstasy, forgetting the trauma of life and enjoying it. I know that I love to steal a peek at "the dream echoing into the unknown, far away land" of these musical somnambulists. But my aim is not to convert you. I'll let the Jesuits take care of that. My only wish is that you recognize the possibility that some bands are as big as Jesus Christ, that is, that their sound is astronomical in proportion to the everyday rumble of disjointed noise. schooner is a rumble of disjointed noise, but with a purpose. a. gagnon (ghost-machine harmony)