VIBRAVOID – Remove the Ties (2025)
Psychedelia in 2025? We’re long past the countercultural continuum that once linked the ’60s to the ’70s, slid into the ’80s, then resurfaced with “psy” sounds and attitudes in the ’90s. And yet, borrowing Francis Bacon’s idea that knowledge is one because its end is one, I’ll argue something equally stubborn: music is one, because its end is one.
That end is commuovere - at least in the Latin sense of the word.
Commovēre is an elegant verb, and anything but sentimental in the modern meaning. It comes from cum- (together, with) and movēre (to move). Literally: to move together, to set in motion with force, to dislodge something from where it stands.
In classical Latin, its semantic field was physical before it was emotional. It meant:
– to stir, shake, throw into agitation (a body, a crowd, an army) – to disturb an established order, to break a state of calm – to provoke an inner movement of the soul, understood as a secondary effect of being shaken
For the Romans, commuovere didn’t mean “to feel more,” but “to stop standing still.” Emotion was a serious matter - often dangerous, almost political.
So let’s allow ourselves to be commossi by this record. Not because it drags us back to the ornate psychedelia of decades past, but because it updates the desire to feel oneself, to be present, to live fully. And let’s be moved with a political and social attitude.
Dancing, then, becomes an ethical act. Just as listening to this album is.