Tabor Dark's new LP mixes paean and elegy in dedication to various thinkers, artists, and spiritual figures who have impacted the artist: Wilson Harris, Alice Coltrane, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, la Niña de los Peines, Mamá Tingó, Liborio, and Jean Toomer (the title comes from a play by the latter; more info below). These 9 tracks are steeped in house as African rhythmic mothership refracted in diaspora.

Voice, both Tabor Dark's own and that of others, is more prominent than in previous releases. From autotune-drenched alien bleats to samples of Dominican poetry and theater, the voice and the resonant vocal cavity represent a new creative space for the project, while also hearkening back to the first Tabor Dark release, "The Raining" (2012), which features a remix of a Slowclap Afronation track.

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"The Sacred Factory" (1927), also entitled “Saint Homo” and “The Saints of Men,” is a symbolist religious drama about 'modern, mechanized life' by mixed-race modernist writer Jean Toomer during his time of study under Gurdijeff's thought. In attempting to use Gurdijeffian symbolism to evoke a reality beyond the senses, Toomer often confused and bewildered readers to the point that they dismissed abstract works like "The Sacred Factory" as unintelligible or indecipherable.

Toomer’s ultimate failure as a Symbolist writer in his spiritual pursuits show that "he remained a victim of alienation, a contemplative mystic and visionary exiled within the prison-house of thought" (Jones 1993: 143). Toomer's failure allows abreu to think through the idea of the body as a sacred factory from a more distant time, but still present moment– when the factory, by its very nature, is always already in ruins, cleaved from itself, overrun by a wilderness of the very symbols it produces. The time is always now; production is ruination.

Reciting names and devotional songs for kith and kin ancestors, friends and lovers from parallel universes, and other techniques can serve as lightposts along an obscure path. But the obscurity or darkness is not the problem: it actually emanates, like light, from within the Real, linking us to each other through struggle. Volosinov tells us the struggle of meaning is connected to the struggle of class.

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Cover image: Invention from a 1315 edition of 'Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices' by Islamic scholar Ismail al-Jazari. Depicts peacock water clock invention operated using water power. In the completed device, the arch containing two peacocks would be surmounted by another containing a peahen that would turn from right to left over the course of half an hour, causing the peacocks to whistle.