Zodiac Variations

 by Thornswrath 

  

Monozodiac variant 3.0

    Fourteen years ago, on my forty-fifth birthday, a contingency of us underground die hards went to see Mono perform at the Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City.  I brought my watercolor set to the bar, and worked up some abstract watercolors at various times throughout the evening.  In fact, I remember I did one for the opening band, The Twilight Sad, they were pretty cool and I always wanted to mail them the painting I did of the backs of the heads of the crowd standing before them while they performed onstage that night.   

[insert TWILIGHT SAD watercolor painting here later]

   The japanese band mono who morphed from post rock to post classical over the course of a couple of decades has since evolved even further along musical lines that may remain nearly incomprehensible to those who've lacked the context of what their first twelve albums sound like.   

    The altered digital scan above I named  'Monozodiac variant 3.0' (in the darker blackened orange reddish tones) may be only one of a whole host of variants which represent a whole array of colors and tones throughout the spectrum, so I'm thinking of building a small cluster of variants which could be shown as a mobius slide show endless .gif looping and shifting colors through the spectrum. 

   In this variant, I seized upon the horsehead nebula shaped flicker of flame at the end of that penetrating wavelength, lending the appearance of a tongue of fire indicating a darker mass behind it, which from some of the tones in the texture resemble the chitinous skin of a gigantic ant head, or creepy cricket facing you head on, crouching before the flickering flames of Hell.  

  You can see what's intended to represent Taka Goto's black mop of hair at the bottom just to the right of center (although in the original watercolor depicted below, he's to the left of center, and his hair is green, sorta like the Joker.) Everything you see depicted erupting around him are the direct results of their music through this painting I made sitting at my table in the Urban Lounge with my watercolor set while my brush dipped in and out of a plastic cup of Oxidane rapidly to spread the various hues onto 100% cold-pressed paper. I painted a few of them during the dizzying, stunning set, and ended up letting different members of the band choose their own ones to take home with them, when we met at the merch-booth during the aftermath of the show. 

   I kept mine, (I'll have to dig into the archives of my blogdom of Thorns in order to find the full scan of it, which I think is being used over in my Grub Live shows blog, or I made a blog for the Mono show, I can't recall offhand. But I gave the original "Monozodiac"  watercolor to my friend Anthony, the Zodiac, who was there at the Urban with us getting facemelted that legendary evening. 

                A scan of the original Monozodiac incarnation of the watercolor I painted at the Mono show in 2010.  I painted a few different ones, I remember some of them were phantasmagorical in their wild abstract depictions of the band members in various electrified poses, shedding a maelstrom of sonic energy.  I gave this one to my friend Anthony. 

   That was a very special night indeed, as anyone lucky enough to have seen Mono perform live can testify. Their shows are unlike most other rock concerts. There's something about their approach, armed now with their new drummer who joined five years ago for their tenth studio album Nowhere Now Here, but the show we were at was way before this, back when their original drummer Yasunori Takada pounded out his legacy of twenty years perpetuating the band in its original outfit. 

   Below is a snipped copy & paste of a scan of the one original watercolor painting I did of the band that I kept for myself (pardon the overlapping blogger thumbnail; it will have to do for now, so at least you can more or less see for yourselves how it manages to eerily depict MONO doing their thing.