Holy Void - All Will Be Revealed In Time
Self-Released
Released on December 13th, 2024
I have been eagerly anticipating the new Holy Void release. I love them. Their music seduces me to travel into darker and more vivid realms, their sonic textures and hexes elevate me above bleak realities.
I am excited to see how their new album, All Will Be Revealed In Time, will sound to a person who has never heard them. I want to watch it explode upon their synapses, and observe he fluid expression as it pours out of the listener.
I know who to bring it to.
..............
I press the doorbell and a loud ‘ding-dong’ carries into the house. I watch as the door knob turn slowly one way and then the other, unable to unlatch the latch from the latch. “Use both hands,” a woman’s voice instructs from behind the door. Success. Now ajar, the door swings open, revealing Jameson, my handsome and sturdy four-and-a-half year old nephew.
“Mom!” he beams, “it’s uncle JD!”
“Hey buddy!” I say, and step inside the house. I bend down and give him a hug and kiss him atop his solid cranium.
“Hi Sheena,” I tell his mother, and stand up to give her a quick hug.
“What are you doing here?” Jameson asks me.
“Well, buddy,” I say, dropping back down to eye level with him, “I came here to see if you wanted to listen to an album with me.”
Jameson’s smile breaks from ear to ear. He nods silently and repetitively, his brown eyes sparkling into mine.
Sheena, relieved to be freed from her son for a bit of time, nimbly steps around the mess of blocks and legos and plastic phone booth that are toppled on the living room floor, and heads to the kitchen.
I reach into my backpack and pull the album out, and hand it to the little lad. He gazes upon it.
“Whoa!” he proclaims. “Holy Void. All Will Be Revealed In Time.”
He turns the album around and looks at the back.
“A psychedelic rock and roll hexad from the cold, dark nidus of Winnipeg.”
I knew then that the album was in the right hands.
“Too Close to the Sun”
“A quick slide out of the birth tunnel and into the blinding light of life,” Jameson proclaims, almost transcendentally from behind closed eyes.
“And yes,” he continues,” soon afterward, the disdain and disappointment of a father awaits. A fall from grace.”
He opens his eyes and points to a booboo on his knee covered up by a Spiderman BandAid, “Dad warned me. “Dang, I thought,” in a sort of slow motion reflection as I went arse-over-tea kettle down the stairs. This will be a difficult reckoning, for him and for me. To realize that I will never see through his eyes. What a challenge. A real test, rising from under his shadow of our parents’ disappointment. I have. But some never will.”
“Dead”
“In that moment, as I lay on my back crying for my father whose advice I had not heeded, I became sort of giddy. If life is just a lockstep trudge towards the abyss, then boy oh boy- he points his finger to the solo and the 2:19 mark of the song- we owe it to ourselves to march with swagger! It’s a service to ourselves, isn’t it?
The boy slides off the couch and lands on his back, laughing. He catches me marvelling at the size and shape of his head. “I know, he says, rolling his eyes. It’s a wonder of genetics, eh?
My grampa has a large dome himself. A gigantic genetic gift. It’s preordained, man.”
“Fear in Your Mind”
“Anyway,” he continues, “what a beautiful chord progression!” G/B/E/G/D/E! This is the kind of thing that helps elevate, levitate us- however momentarily- above the shackles of our dreary existence!
“Each drum shot, like the gavel of some judge sentencing us to the lifetime of servitude! Existence proving futile all the time! And resistance!”
The boy gets up and walks toward the kitchen, talking all the while.
“This song should welcome our oppressors into the furnaces of hell!”
He thrusts his two little middle fingers into the air as he rounds the corner.
I hear him negotiating with his mom. “One for me, one for uncle JD.”
He walks back into the room holding two juice boxes and hands one to me. We sip them contemplatively “Some kind of fruit medley,” Jameson exclaims.
“Passing”
We nod our heads in sync to the slow plodding groove.
“Like priests on the battlefield offering salvation to dying soldiers,” the boy says. “But it’s really more of a spell, to goad the spirits into the void.”
He kicks a blue Lego windmill across the room and it clatters against the wall.
“Jameson,” his mother mechanically chides from the kitchen. Jameson winks at me, and I wink back at him.
“Golden Lies”
“Yes! YES! “It’s like a carousel at a funhouse that goes around eternally though the dessicated wastelands. Spin us faster and faster! Disorient us! Draw and quarter! Prod and hammer! Cleave and vivisect!”
He spins on the ground, pivoting around his voluminous head.
The song ends and he stops, breath coming heavy, ninja turtles shirt riding up his stomach, exposing his little bellybutton.
His eyes are aglow and meditative.
“The Restless”
“Ah, a lullaby!” he declares from his back, staring at the ceiling. “To isolation, obsessions. To our fraught relationship with our imagination. To the experimenter in his lair. To his tangled knot of ideas and intentions, connecting wires, that occasionally emit a spark and a shock. To alover’s soothing hand upon our shoulder. To the purring kitty curled in our lap.”
“Love”
Jameson turns his eyes to mine. He opens his mouth to speak, but says nothing. He gets up off of the floor and walks toward me. He puts his little hand onto mine. His eyes pierce into mine steadfast and compassionate. “There are many pathways,” he tells me, gently. I swallow and take a deep breath.
“In the End I’m Nothing Anyways”
The boy gets up and walks to the window, drawing the curtains back. Bright light from the mid-afternoon sun floods the room. My weary eyes are blinded temporarily.
“Look at the insistence of beauty. At the brilliance of the snow reflecting the sun across the rooftops. Gaze upon the puffs of exhaust billowing out of chimneys and evaporating in the freezing December air.” I detect hints of optimism in his little voice. “Preparation for relinquishment,” he mutters to himself.
“Salvation”
Jameson steps back from the window, and lets out a loud cry of pain. He raises his foot, revealing the culprit- a little lego construction worker, laying face up, smiling.
“Fuck sakes!” he hollers.
“Jameson!” his mother yells sharply from the kitchen. Footsteps thud heavily as she rounds the corner. “It’s time for your bath.”
Jameson begins to cry big sobs, tears streaming down his cheeks almost instantly. His mother scoops him up in one arm and carries him up the stairs. The lad’s wailing grows more and more piercing all the way.
As I am about to close the door to leave I hear him bellow. “Uncle JD! I am anointed in the ecstasy of this music!”
I close the door and head into the cold afternoon.
- JD Ormond
