The pink full moon, sees the release of Till Your Mind Is Shining the fourth track to be taken from Peter Gabriel’s forthcoming album o\i.
“To my ears it’s the closest I get to a pop song on this record,” says Gabriel.
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, the Dark-Side Mix by Tchad Blake is the first version to be released.
‘The song began around a chord sequence which I liked and which felt quite poppy and playful, so I just kept on playing around with it till I had something. Of all the songs that I’ve written for i/o and o\i this is probably the poppiest for me.
It takes me back to my schooldays, in some ways, because before there was Genesis we were effectively trying to be songwriters more than musicians – pop songs or soul / R&B songs. I think this song connects me back to some of those roots and the sort of thing that I was working on then and trying to master.
Some elements of this are a few years old, I mean pretty much most things I work on take a while to mature. I leave songs for a while and go and do something else and when I come back to them and they smell alive, I will want to complete them. I really enjoyed singing this one, particularly the end, and I think the band had a good time playing it too. You can hear some wonderful performances from all the band. It was really a fun thing to create.
I’ve always been fascinated by explorations of consciousness and attempts to understand from where it originated, along with all the recent investigations into animal and plant sentience.
In some ways it’s about opening up the mind and stepping inside to understand a little more of ourselves and the world we live in with the hope that we respond a little more responsibly and compassionately.’
This month’s art comes from Tatsuo Miyajima and his work ‘Warp Time with Warp Self, No.2’. Miyajima is a contemporary artist from Tokyo, Japan, who has held numerous exhibitions both in Japan and abroad. He first came to prominence in 1988 when he was invited to the Venice Biennale, in the young artist’s section, where his works using digital numerals attracted international attention. Since 1996, he has also been promoting the ‘Kaki Tree Project,’ an art project that promotes peace and the importance of life through the planting of saplings taken from a kaki tree in Nagasaki which miraculously survived the atomic bomb.
‘I went to Hiroshima a few years back and talked to some of the survivors of the bomb, extraordinary women who have dedicated their lives to keeping alive their experience of the awful reality and total horror of a nuclear bomb.
I really wanted an image that felt like a mixture of something cold and structured and informative as well as being soft and self-reflective. Tatsuo calls this piece ‘Warp Time with Warp Self, No.2’ and I love that it feels quite futuristic in one sense, with numbers and data and yet you’ve got this ‘warp self’ in the background. There’s an interaction between the human and the mechanical AI world that we’re creating, or at least that’s what it says to me. I like that, particularly in the context of where the ‘Shining Mind’ could lead you and what that is there to counter, in terms of what we’re creating in this outside world.
On the one hand, there’s time and space and data and analysis and then on the other hand there’s this journey inside us, that I think is linked to Buddhist thought, which feels as if it belongs right in there. So, it’s that marriage between the two that I got excited about.’
Listen to ‘Till Your Mind Is Shining’ – BELOW:
Mark ‘Spike’ Stent’s Bright-Side Mix of Till Your Mind Is Shining will be released later in the month, on the new moon. Further details on the release plans for the full album will follow.
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