“The drawing unfolded intuitively and spontaneously. I didn’t have to think about what I was going to draw – it literally projected itself out of my head onto the canvas. I had the sense that my eyes were merely transferring, out of a boundless and radiant space, the image onto the canvas, and all I had to do was effortlessly delineate or play the patterns I was seeing on the canvas. This sense of ‘seeing’ was not just a visual experience, but synaesthetic. The drawing took a little over a week of very intense participation. Most often I had no awareness of day or night and recall eating only a few times.”
– Bill Walker, Album Artist of ‘Anthem of the Sun’
As a psychedelic mystical rendering of the Rorschach test, Anthem of the Sun is uniquely effective. As an intoxicatingly pigmented appropriation of Eastern symbolism and a nod to the fragments of an ancient delirium it is equally so. As a reimagining of the formal boundaries of abstraction and the original prescriptions of surrealism, it’s riveting. It’s the off grid, shroom-foraging philosophy of the Summer of Love writ large over a dizzying canvas of deep purples, precocious azures, and zippy limes.
While we’re at it, I’m going to go ahead and claim Anthem of the Sun as proof against the theory of pareidolia, which is the tendency of humans to recognize familiar symbols in natural phenomena and random patterns. Pareidolia, and its parent theory of apophenia, argue that our search for patterns, sequences, and general coherence in the like of clouds will always be ultimately meaningless in the face of an indifferent, incoherent, and random universe. A face on the moon? Folly, a kind of existential consolation prize for losing out to Chaos Theory.
Ultimately meaningless? Anthem of the Sun says nay to all that. Those patterns on the sun, that message in the tree bark, the personalized melody of the night bird singing outside on a swaying branch? That’s hard core reality, man. That’s your experience of life, and this experiential quality endows the natural world with meaning- chaos and her kin be darned. No amount of hand wringing about the misleading nature of the subjective human experience can shake the willful foundation of Anthem of the Sun. In the words of Repo Man’s Miller life is based upon a subjectively meaningful ‘latticework of coincidence’ and Grateful Dead says ‘hey sure’ to that whole concept. Their album then becomes a catalyst for stimulating neuronal connections and weaving together serendipitous pieces of happenstance into something that looks almost coherent.
The cover art was by Bill Walker who was, I presume, wacky and wonderful (hi Bill!). Featuring a moving feast of visually inventive forms, Anthem’s aesthetic appeal mirrors the collaborative and highly explorative nature of the auditory experience. Anthem creates a bizarre sense of nostalgic dissonance, whereby we grasp for recollected memories that we can’t claim as our own. Anthem casts us all as chance wanderers in the bizarre realm of memory, collective imagination, and personal myth making.
