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$14.99 CD-R
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ARICA
Heaven
(Arica)
 "Heaven"
"Thorn"
Some ten or twelve years ago, a friend and I got wind of a jazz record sale to be held early one morning at a mall in the suburbs outside of Kansas City. Of course we arrived at what seemed to be the crack of dawn to wait in line, and when the organizer of the sale finally arrived we kindly proffered to volunteer and help him set up the tables, subsequently staggering and weaving from the storage room as we attempted to simultaneously carry boxes while frantically flipping through them. As I recall, there was little left to be had by the time the sale was to officially begin after the glorious haul we had just made, and we subsequently decamped to my friends home for a lazy afternoon of listening and letting the magnitude of the day's treasure sink in. We listened to any number of records that day that made an indelible impression, but the album that was the most enigmatic wasn't exactly a jazz record per se at all, it was a profoundly mysterious LP with little in the way of information by a group called Arica.
The story of how the music on the Arica LPs, for there are at least three or four, exactly came to be is still yet to be written; rarely has such incredible music been so un-Googleable. What I can tell you, and what seems to be at least fairly common knowledge, is that Arica is a human potential movement founded at some point in the sixties by a Bolivian mystic named Oscar Ichazo, that endeavors to undertake the "definitive analysis of the human mind and the achievement of pristine enlightenment." A shaman introduced Ichazo to pyschotropic drugs such as ayahuasca while still a teenager, which instigated a life-long interest in hidden knowledge. He began formulating his quasi-Gurdjieffian system in the mid-fifties, and in 1968 made true believers of an influential group of initiates in the desert of northern Chile, including several Americans that came back to the States spreading the gospel, as it were. There was a period of rapid growth with workshops being formed to explore the kinesthetic movements that Ichazo believed would aid deep concentration. Drugs such as LSD and cocaine were apparently also used as aids towards higher development, and a group of Aricans including Ichazo were even sent to train the cast of Alejandro Jodorowsky's underground masterpiece Holy Mountain.
They were based out of the Essex Hotel here in New York, and apparently had a shop that sold pamphlets and privately pressed LPs, the music supposedly being an aid to meditative states and to do calisthenics to. The record we're reviewing, Heaven, somewhat inexplicably came out on Michael Lang's Polydor subsidiary label Just Sunshine, best known for releasing such Other Music favorites like Betty Davis, Karen Dalton, and the Voices of East Harlem. As with Scientology, Arica no doubt attracted their fair share of musicians, actors, and other arty-farty types, and it is to be assumed that a fairly deep pool of talent was convened to bring this remarkable document into existence.
While hard pressed to compare it to anything exactly, you'd be in the approximate neighborhood if you were to imagine a meeting between Ash Ra Tempel and the most cosmically meditative sounds of Sun Ra. Deeply weird, yet compulsively listenable and other-worldly, this music creeps along with singular purpose to the ringing of silver bells and bass cushions. Oscar Ichazo and the Arica Institute are still active, and these are handmade CD-Rs recently reissued by the society. We have a limited supply and they take awhile to restock so act fast as they come with our highest recommendation. [MK] |
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Junior Boys
