Picture the scene: time is suspended. You kiss the air like a jewel without. Knives round the corner. People are frozen, standing motionless before you. Their actions are as well, driven into the core of Earth like reversal of all that is infinite and known as infinite. This is a depressing situation – how do we rectify it? Mario Martinez might say each wound carried creationally has a healing field, an empowering component that honours its original organism to create the best outcome.

Look at where you’re manifesting the wound – you can get angry with shame, but what you feel then is humiliation? Look and think “What is the honourable thing to do?” Honourable consciousness is to respond to a shaming consciousness, and this kills the language of shame. Commitment, honour and loyalty through setting clear limits. and people generally don’t like joy; it’s a dangerous emotion. Inflammation of joy is caused by the shame brought from it, of another – knowing pro-flammatory products causes health to improve. Immunologically, people still sometimes die to protect the flag. But the reality is they’re only dead for a short time. And like the sea shore, the tide comes back in to thrive.

The “covenant of safety” is the thematic composite of Oh, Yoko’s “Seashore”, a 26 minute three-tracker released on Normal Cookie. The cover art depicts a small Japanese female reaching outside a car door, seemingly motionless besides arm-movement. Definitely, this is a good metaphor for Rie Mitsutake and Will Long’s music, seeing as these lull-isms have a reasoned resonance Sawako might aim towards, a cot-to-and-fro, “Seashore” unfurling its guitar with plink/plonk, casual indeterminancy that recalls Charles Hayward’s percussive rhythm dynamism, set to harmonic prop-petting beyond mast-iculation. Or: overarched grandeur of the emotional heft and transmogrified settings, which even on “Sprinkles Ambient Ballroom”, the duo don’t cut their slack too loose on what they’ve offered up. Which is bliss.

Normal Cookie as a label is new, a self-publishing music and art emporium, based in Tokyo, Japan, where Fluid regulars Will Long and Bvdub have visited in recent times. The final mix of “Seashore” here is fundamental to the child’s look – “Right just now you feel lost and confused”; “How do you know that?”; “I just do” the conversation passes on. With a solid shimmering 4/4 and choral tones backing the brigadeering, there’s a certain early noughties feel of electronic Plaid and Pilote that runs through these compostions. Quietly soaring and purposeful, Oh, Yoko show us where manifesting the wound is as much an exercise in condemning the absolute, as it is about ‘sound baggage handling’. In other words, we avoid the new at times because the old has more of an astute blend of influences; it doesn’t meek.

“I learned… that to condemn others is a grave mistake, since hatred, and even the wrong kind of criticism, is an evil which recoils upon its author and poisons every human relationship.

That does not mean we should be blind to the weaknesses or wickedness of others, any more than to our own, but that we should learn to look at them as the limitations of birth and circumstance, limitations which it is our duty to help them rise above. In this I have found that example and service are more helpful than advice or preaching.” ~ Margaret Bondfield, What Life Has Taught Me.

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