*2023 stock* "Much of the time creative inspiration hits you in a sudden, explosive burst, and other times it seeps into your senses slowly, through practice, repetition, trial and error, or wandering. But then there are those weird fractures that open up a rift in something, somewhere, that was already in motion. An interruption. A fissure pushing hot air right up into an area you were standing in, and the sound and pressure and heat are too much to ignore and you have to do something about it right then and there. The morphic vent lifts your body off the ground, entrains you within its inner rhythms and sets you off, drifting, in a different direction. This album was recorded in its entirety in the middle of another album, in the pause, in the settling dusts of relocating to a new place.
Like most of the music I have performed and recorded as long as I can remember, Levitation Elixir can’t be pinned down in its musical style. But these 10 songs, flow right into each like a creek that narrows and widens, shifting the intensity and capacity of the watery environment. The fissure that burst open in me pulled out lost childhood memory-worlds and latent desires. Squirming inside the burnt nerve endings of post-pandemic life, I have regular conversations with people, who have all been experiencing a collapsing of their sense of “place-ness” — of having to reconvene a new home, or new understanding of home. It seems like we’re all here, the vibe shift, which isn’t anywhere we’ve know. When I sat down and actually thought about it, I’d never lived in a space for more than 8 years of my life. And in strange and radicant ways, all the jumps to and from homes have come crashing together in a sludge of instrumental melodies growing inside a tangled tree vine that if you bit into its tough but porous skin a sonic slime would pour out devotional sounds honoring these compounded and smeared memories.
And yet this album isn’t defined by any one of these personal placeholders. I turned 38 when I finished this album, and now I have spent chunks of my life playing in the spacious horns and windy rural high plains of middle America, in the bug filled gospel lanterns and swampy calypso rhythms of the gulf coast, in the chamber pop and brick mazes of Chicago, in the fuzzy keys and slippery vibes of the stoned Rockies, in the scorching sands and saprodelic sonoran desert, in the burnt forest magic and dark skies of the high alpine in Northern Arizona. Not sure if I have shed many skins or am just filled with more and more scar tissue." - Cecyl Ruehlen
