Live Journal /// Gatekeeper @ Baltimore House - 2.7.14
When I was a kid my dad was fond of ordering strange products, that would show up at the house every once and a while, from far away lands. This included a lot of massage chairs, exercise machines and, one day, something he called a "sensory deprivation tank." It sounds ominous, but really all it was, was a simple box that would get filled with water and enough salt to make a human buoyant on the water. The box was made to ensure total darkness and total silence once you were inside it, and once you were… well you would just lie down and… float. My dad let me go in there a couple times and I remember being weightless in the dark and silence. With no sound, no vision and no gravity, my dad explained that you could have hallucinations, existential journeys and utter relaxation in there. I guess that’s what he wanted to experience at the time through that tank.
There's something fascinating in that idea of sensorial confusion without the aid of drugs or alcohol. The idea that we can create experiences for ourselves without tampering with the chemicals in our brains directly, but rather, simply through human creativity, ingenuity and imagination, is a very cool thing. I think that’s what my dad got from the sensory deprivation tank at that time, and I think thats what Gatekeeper achieved at Baltimore House on Friday. If nothing else: the venue certainly felt like something very close to a sensory deprivation tank.
In that same way I remember floating in the black nothingness of that strange tank when I was a kid, I remember floating in something, somehow, not altogether dissimilar on Friday night. All I could see was smoke and, for all I knew, I could very well have been upright, on my head or even sideways. The entire floor could have fallen out underneath me during Gatekeeper’s set and I could have been levitating, and I tell you, I would have had no idea. There really was nothing to prove that this wasn’t happening, beyond an occasional blast of strobe on stage in which the figures of Aaron David Ross and Matthew Arkell, for a few moments, could be seen before disappearing again. It seemed to be that as soon as some familiar landmark would appear or some sense began to return of ones bearings, yet another mushroom cloud of smoke would blast out from somewhere between Aaron and Matt and effectively end all hope for orientation once again.
Like a cannon pointed at the crowd, in the pulsating red, blue and green lasers I remember seeing that fog billow straight towards me like a great venus fly trap expanding itself outward and swallowing up what seemed to be the entire universe. I remember the music pulsating and filling in all the excess space between the visual and sensory barrage and the bursts of strobes and the momentary clearing of fog, which seemed to become something like the act of coming up from the depths of the ocean to grab a breath of oxygen. Each time we would come up for oxygen the air tasted sweet, but the waves which quickly pulled us under once again, somehow, seemed even sweeter. Playing tracks from across their catalogue, Giza to Chronos, Gatekeeper really seemed to win the crowd too from those who were there specifically to see them to those who never had, but made a point to enjoy some new music that night. Every so often, in this surreal dream world, one would catch a glimpse of some fellow member of the experience and it always seemed that they were somehow “in it” too and understanding what was happening in the same way you were. The whole thing seemed even more surreal as the fire department arrived twice thinking the place was burning down. Nobody seemed to mind or care though, and the band played on.
