Jordan Deal - Seas of Triple Consciousness

Horn of Plenty's Jim Strong (Eyes of the Amarylis) connections have led them - and now us, and then you should you take the bait - to one of the more arresting and fully formed voices to emerge from the American underground in quite some time. Based out of Philadelphia, Jordan Deal's first move towards the light was the GOGO Underworld cassette for Strong's Cor Ardens imprint in 2022, an unusual suite of sample-heavy musique concrete charged with the poetics and polemics of Black American musical expression, be that spiritual, gospel, jazz or punk. Interesting as it was, it does little to prepare you for the power of the immaculately titled Seas of Triple Consciousness. Recorded across various monasteries and churches in both rural France and Deal's hometown, and built around a loosely connected thread of characters caught in a dystopian malaise, its eleven tracks express the kind of identity-driven, emotional spiritualism and intellectual rigour we might associate with Sun Ra, Julius Eastman or Angel Bat Dawid. Mostly favouring piano, and introducing a little acoustic guitar in its closing third, Deal weaves a phantasmagorical vista of the Black experience which just as much coinjures the poetic spectre of Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as it makes its own kind of sense of Nick Cave's fascination with Nina Simone. A Black Gothic Blues. These are beautifully performed songs that despite their minimalist form express a grand ambition. You might call them torch songs. It could well be another re-rendering of the outsider blues. Mostly, though, Deal is on their own path to enlightenment, head unbowed, vision panoramic, constructing their own language of understanding as he goes. Black Consciousness, yes, but also The Black Imagination, too. The darkness will eventually consume us all, but before then, this kind of light...