When Young Gods was released, in 1987, a small but influential vanguard of music journalists went berserk. In the UK, particularly, the album was strewn about with an ecstatic critical discourse that might have been called hype had the band not proved themselves to be so very capable of justifying it. At their shows, you could smell the future: metalheads and artniks stood open-mouthed. “When I first knew there was an affordable sampler on the market,” Treichler says, “I just dropped the guitar because to me it was a revolution — I think I’d come up against my own limitations with the guitar, and now there was this completely different approach to writing music. It was to write with sounds, not chords and tonalities. We didn’t actually plan anything, but it was just very, very exciting for us to be doing this and became exciting for other people as well. That was the idea. And we had really, really good press in England — single of the week, album of the year. Yeah, it was fantastic.”
For several years Young Gods have been working with the anthropologist Jeremy Narby, author of 1995’s The Cosmic Serpent (Tarcher), on a words-and-music presentation called the Amazonia Ambient Project. “We do it when there’s a good opportunity,” Treichler says, “but it’s not something that’s easy to propose to promoters because they don’t really know how to deal with it. We call it a sonic conference because Jeremy is the main guy and he talks about the experiences he’s had with indigenous peoples and tries to make a bridge between the world of today — science, specifically, and molecular biology — and primitive knowledge.”
Put crudely, Narby’s thesis is that the medicine men of the Peruvian Amazon Basin, munching on their sacred roots, are at a molecular level receiving actual information from nature spirits — guidance, instruction, illumination. This is all very much Treichler’s cup of hallucinogenic tea, and he has made several voyages into the jungle with Narby. Does he do the full shamanic trip every time? “Yes, yes. Different people, different places — sometimes its more like NGO type of work, recording those peoples, archiving their music. Sometimes it’s meeting with medicine men. . . . Well, these are strong experiences. What can I say? They have changed me, but not in a radical way I don’t think. And from any psychedelic experience, it doesn’t have to be in a forest, you can learn. Of course, some people don’t, hur hur hur.”
Super Ready/Fragmenté is firmly in the Young Gods groove, albeit somewhat glossed with the smoother electronic surfaces and acoustic departures of their latter years: riffs that snap you in and out like a hypnotist’s fingers, incantatory vocals in English or French. On the album’s Amazon.com page, in the “Editorial Review” section, there is a remarkable piece of prose that appears to have been auto-translated from the French and that actually describes the record better than I could: after hailing the band as “venturers, land-clearers” and “mad scholars” the anonymous author declares that Super Ready/Fragmenté has “been part of these major albums who, behind a palpable emergency and a feeling of insecurity, devotes himself and confides in the course of poisonous, disturbing and passionate listenings.” Fuckin’ A! Might the album’s title, I ask Treichler, be read as a formula for living, a sort of broken-openness to experience? “That’s it!” he says. “It’s about . . . whether you feel a bit fragmented, you know, your heart, or your brain — it’s fragmented but you feel somehow positive and ready to do something. It’s like: ‘Yes, future!’ You know? Something like that, yeah. Definitely!”
