A reminder post that all sales of this final release: The Sound of Flowers Dying Carry Messages Through the Wind from Blood of the Black Owl directly supports the following vital organization:
(All images provide direct links for more information)
"I've been listening to Blood of the Black Owl (BotBO) since around 2013 or so, starting when I stumbled upon the BotBO Celestial Split at a record store in Oakland that year. Chet’s side of the record, Contemplating the Death of An Old Friend, instantly moved me. I would spend hours wandering both the dingy urban environs of West Oakland and the young redwood forest tucked away in the hills, listening to Ruhr Hunter, BotBO and Rain (Fearthainne), enraptured in cathartic states of connection to place and dream. All of Chet’s work is of a spiritual quality–prayerful and alive–and so when he sent me his newest record, I knew that it would contain messages deeper than one could catch from a casual listen.
The Sound of Flowers Dying…
The first track from Blood of the Black Owl’s newest album The Sound of Flowers Dying Carry Messages Through the Wind sets the tone of possibly the darkest recording that I’ve yet heard from Chet, not in atmosphere, but in the heart wrenching and prayerful song crafted to honor the young ones who left this world too early…
To be in this world alone…
Útburður: a child left in the wilderness to die. A child to a ghost. A ghost to the place it was forgotten… For those who have searched deeper into the vast well of Chet’s offerings, you might have found that he has an undying gratitude towards our Indigenous communities in prayer, and in embodied action.
Across Turtle Island, our Indigenous communities continue to reel from the echoes of America's earlier genocidal practices such as that of the Indian Boarding School era, where children were taken from their homes and forced to assimilate to Christian/Catholic/American ideologies. Children were tortured for practicing their language, their culture, their identity. Many children were left to die due to conditions of neglect, and outright violence. Every Indigenous person I know, here on Turtle Island, has a story about a relative who has been victim to this era of genocidal violence. I preface with these words because Chet’s offerings are not simply songs, they are carefully and emotionally crafted prayers. The Sound of Flowers Dying is a stunning tribute to the young ones left behind, carried skyward through dulcimer, flute, voice, guitar and bass instrumentations. This song moves in emotional segmentations–timed with space for reflection and attunement to stillness. This song feels to me like a child's song. A song for the lost children to follow on their journey home.
…Carry Messages Through the Wind
This final song starts with a well placed quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, where she invokes that to become part of this living world again (one we may not be Indigenous to) we must practice the “grammar of animacy”, which is a practice long central to Chet’s medicinal (and in my humble opinion, cultural) work through Glass Throat Recordings and his associated projects.
The lyrical watershed of this song alone contains tributaries of wrathful grief and spiraling prayer. They also speak to the horrors upon the living world–one that aches for us to return again.
This song holds all the elements that one might expect to hear in a BotBO record. Yet this time, Carry Messages Through the Wind, brings the listener from slow trickling streams and mournful movements into a widening cascade of psychedelic melodies. Emerging all at once primal and ethereal and creating a unique sound to his offering. I encounter, again, an awe of how well placed Chet’s dulcimer and sacred wind instruments are, catalysing transition and sounds’ capacity for animate conversation. This album marks a new era that his work has entered musically. The song’s dreamlike conclusion features keys from Glass Throat Record’s Rachel Scott, which throws those of us familiar, into an alternate reality where BotBO were a band in the 70s. A true climactic end to another unique offering from my most cherished label in the Pacific Northwest, Glass Throat Recordings."
-Heron
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I also strongly encourage you all to take interest and support these other indigenous links provided. All of which hold a profound and direct inspiration towards the curation of this very last B.o.t.B.O. album.
The curation of this collection is inspired by the poetry and spoken word of Uncle John Trudell, as well as the Kuper Island Podcast (an eight part series).
Please watch and support this series here:
Please view this film here:
Please read this book and seek out the very hard to find documentary that coincides.
A very special thank you to my indigenous family, Aunties, Uncles, Sisters and Brothers I've personally had the profound and emotional experience of speaking directly with regarding their personal battles with spiritual cancer at the hands of Christian Nationalists and the tribal traumas deeply endured through cultural genocide and religious colonialism! I am unconditionally grateful and truly thankful for their medicinal teachings, trust, strength, understanding and respect confided within me.
Glass Throat Recordings stands in solidarity!
I raise up with honor and gratitude the Coast Salish land itself and the Dkhw Duw’Absh.
I dedicate my final album under the moniker of Blood of the Black Owl, to all my relatives of this great Turtle Island, and to all whom continue to suffer under Christian Nationalist rule and colonial suppression!
Mitakuye Oyasin
-Cante’ Waste’ ObMani’ Wicasa / Chet W. Scott
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