Photo Credit: Priti Shikotra
Michael Wright is Luminous Beings, who was originally from the States, (Portland, OR), and went through a stunning transformation initiated by religious trauma as he lived in Los Angeles, and now creates from his home in the UK. And the music he’s coming up with is as liberating spiritually as it is vividly refreshing musically.
His new album ‘Horrors’ shows how he found release and transcendence in the creative hard music political questions and existential confrontations of bands like the Deftones and Radiohead, along with a joy for aesthetics by sound composers and soundtrack performers like Hans Zimmer and John Williams. It’s that intimately confessional approach to his message and widescreen scope of sound that makes his album ‘Horrors’ so distinctive in its worldview and expression.
Like an author such as Philip K. Dick, Wright dives into the dark side of both humanity’s monstrous impulses to cause damage and its capacity to heal, while touching on pop culture debris and the psychological hubris of the cult mentality to explore his way out of dystopian madness.
The first single “Life-Vessel” had evoked the monster of Dr. Frankenstein, grappling with his humanity inside a body of violent impulses; the new song “Ouroboros” (which is second to last on the full-length) takes up the message of Martin Luther King Jr. in advocating love over the destruction of fighting hate with hate.
With plans to play out a few weeks this Europe, Luminous Bodies makes a starkly unique first appearance for listeners tired of rock mired in tropes and genres, blending caustic sounds with cathartic rhapsodies, almost Zen-like quietude with open-veined rock anthems.
Exclusive song description from Michael Wright to Big Takeover:
“Ouroboros is, in essence, a song about not just anti-violence, but anti-hate. Lyrically, it began as a way to process the horrific Charlottesville attack in the summer of 2017, and grew into a weave of all the different threads of violence, and how we tend to answer them with more violence (thereby “driving out darkness with darkness”). The ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, seemed an apt symbol for this never ending cycle of violence and war, especially as we are once again reminded of it.”
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