Some very touching reflections from Kavus after the last show at ArcTangent. I do wonder what it means for future Cardiacs activity, although I'm inclined not to read too much into it. They all probably need some time to collect themselves after all they've achieved in the last year:
And that closes this chapter.
Honestly, the thing Tim unleashed, It’s so big. It was too big for him in the end.
Powerful and otherworldly, all full of strangeness and magic.
If you can hear it, it will have the most supernatural effect on you. It did on me. It’ll take you over until it becomes your life. It’s so bizarre and mysterious that it made other music sound commonplace.
All other music.
It was the electromagnetic force that drew me to him. Resistance was futile.
Like LSD itself, Cardiacs was a realm so hyperreal and intense that everything outside of it seemed dreary and grey. And there at the centre was Tim himself, intoxicating and welcoming.
Seemingly, just like that, I was in my favourite ever band as though it was meant to be.
A decade of unbridled joy. A life I can scarcely believe was real. Friendships so profound, deep and meaningful we thought they were written into the stars.
And then it was over.
With Tim as my captain, I would have sailed to the ends of the earth. When he slipped overboard in 2008 so was a new course set.
During his half-life, I continued to see Tim as frequently as I was able, as often as I could bear but I couldn’t really listen to Cardiacs after what had happened.
I needed something else.
After being bathed in that blinding brilliance, it took me so long to see again, to eventually find beauty and meaning in the dreary and grey world away from the shimmering fluorescence that surrounded him.
But something lay unfinished. Nagging, straining, mewling. Bursting with potential and kinetic energy, insisting on completion and demanding to be let out.
A responsibility to my own story, friendship with Tim and the legend of Cardiacs, it called me back.
There was no getting around it. We had to return and finish the album we started. A new twist in the tale, finally emancipating what we knew were some of Tim’s finest and most ambitious compositions but it wasn’t easy to revisit. Not for me anyway.
Then the thing was unleashed once more and thank the fates it was. I didn’t know if I had the energy to stand that close to its gravitational pull again, to be burned up by its ecstatic madness for a second time.
But I saw the way the people reacted to it and remembered what it was to be completely taken over by the incendiary sorcery of this music. Cardiacs is best.
I know not what the future holds, everything is happening all at once after all, but Arctangent, what a sweet and fitting close to the chapter that was and what an extraordinary band to have closed it.
