The Oceanic State, or the oceanic feeling as Romain Rolland called it in a letter to Sigmund Freud, is the source of all religiousness. It is the feeling of being one with the universe; it is at once the dissolution and the melding together of the observer and the observed. But it also the state in which an infant exists, before it develops the concepts of “self” and “other”. When it has no understanding of where its self ends and the world begins.
This EP is like an infant in that state. It is what came out of a moment of spontaneous inspiration that materialized in a few recording sessions back in 2017 with only words, their meanings, and their rhythms as a compass and absolutely nothing else planned. It has no clear sense of what exactly it is or what it’s trying to do – at least not yet – but it is vibrant with potential. Since the recording sessions, it has been nurtured in the studio, and much unlike an infant, it had parts chopped off, removed, and rearranged. Even though Million Ear has since then developed a sense of what it is and is making its first steps into the world, we find it worthwhile to share with you the moment when it was conceived and born.
Million Ear is a formation created in Rotterdam that embeds lyrics and poetry in soundscapes that blend Rap, Rock, and Jazz with ambient, avant-garde, and noise elements in a constantly changing, freely improvised musical setting.
The band draws inspiration from artists that have set words with philosophical and political content to live music in the past and the present, as well as from musical traditions of spontaneous improvised expression. Influences range from Gil Scott Heron, One Day as a Lion, The Robert Glasper Experiment, Clipping., and others, but with the element of a musical landscape that is always improvised and in an interplay with the lyrics. As a result, no two of the band’s performances are ever the same.
The band consists of Filippos Glinavos on guitar and playing with words and Rok Zalokar on keyboards, who are joined by different drummers.
Tracklist
Availability
Free streaming and downloads (name your price) are available through our Bandcamp shop kamizdat.bandcamp.com.
Some rights reserved under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence www.creativecommons.com/licence
Credits
Million Ear · music & production
Rok Zalokar · mix
Kostas Katsantonis · mastering
Eva Poženel · cover