Oh Poison Flower, Happy Birthday to Western Spaghettification by INUS, 8/9/2019
Bobby Bray I’ve known since 4th grade. I was in Ms Shaw’s. He in Ms. Albertson’s across the hall. I’ve watched him go from the saxophone section of band class to The Locust to Holy Molar to INUS. All of it makes sense. There are gaps of years in between and the gaps are the places in which personal history creates context for evolution, the spaces where flowers grow (but flowers from Baudelaire).
In 4th grade Bobby and I sat in a line of three saxophonists with a girl called Cherie Wood. Or maybe Sherry. When kids in band class talked about her behind her back they called her “Sha-reeeee” because her sax had a cracked reed and the sounds she made were violent, painful, and harsh. Cherie/Sherry Wood was no-wave as fuck based purely on lack of talent. Whether Bobby had sax talent I don’t recall. Memory thins out as you move away from the events in question. How many things do you truly remember from each year of your childhood? Be like Proust and add up all your memories and how much page space would 4th grade yield? A paragraph? A few lines?
Bobby in INUS (as in the Locust and Molar) exists in a place where “talent” doesn’t explain his work. His songs pull from places outside the grasp and reality of most musicians. It’s weird alien scientist psychedelic death-prog that sounds like cells dividing and rot eating away at a wound and dark angels doing bong rips off jet contrails.
The INUS record Three One G released two years ago today feels like a natural progression from Bobby’s stuff as a Locust, a progression then an acceleration to (quoting Quintron) “a place unknown.” As The Institute for Navigating the Universal Self, Bobby, Chad Deal (Phantom Twins), and Brandon Relf (Sleeping People) handed us their LP Western Spaghettification two years ago like some kind of poisonous corsage flower that’s also a physicist that’s also a standup comedian that’s also a virus that’s also a Chinese puzzle trap that will tear off your fingers. It’s a gift to us and it’s also a riddle, a funny scene from a dystopic romance, a barking dog, and a fever dream. Happy birthday, baby.
–Adam Gnade, author of the Three One G released books Locust House, This is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You, Float Me Away, Floodwaters, and the upcoming “food novel”