I have a confession.
At 14 years old, on a blustery Spring day, I decided to cheat on a test about a book I still haven’t read: The Odyssey.
Set to leave school early for a dentist appointment, I remember tapping my foot in the back row of English class, jacket on, waiting to bolt. That’s when Mr. Flaherty passed back one too many tests. Without hesitating, I slid the extra test into my backpack. Later, at home, I filled it out, eventually copying my open-book answers in class the next afternoon.
I got an A.
For the past twenty years, this act of pubescent hoodwinking has existed under the heavy veil of subconscious. I’d forgotten the whole thing until this past Spring, on another blustery weekday, when Estonian wunderkind and Jam Jar favorite, Misha Panfilov, reached out and asked me to contribute words for the jacket of his upcoming record, Where The Birds Fly.
For someone who never read Homer’s epic, nor had any idea that Matt Damon would soon perform as Odysseus across every movie screen in the world, I am now surprised that Misha’s album inspired in me a reference from the ancient text. Aeolus, divine ruler and keeper of the winds.
Something about the music, paired with the trippy wizard on the front cover, conjured an image I’d stored away in the dark recesses of my adolescent brain: Odysseus surfing the skies with his beat and burdened crew.
Which means I actually retained something from high school — Wowzers.
Anyway, this record is a real gem, and I’m grateful to Misha for helping me begin this long-awaited dream of contributing my own words to a physical record!
As you read my entry below, feel free to listen to the single, “When I See You (It Feels Wonderful”).
When I first heard Where The Birds Fly, I was stretched out on a park bench. It was midday. Misha’s swirling compositions blew through my headphones as warm wind gusts blew through my hair. The bright green leaves of a ginkgo tree danced and flickered over my shoulder. Flower petals shook in a nearby garden — purples and pinks, reds and yellows. Soil-rooted stems bounced back and forth. Clouds whipped by overhead, casting quick shadows across a playscape brimming with children. The wind and the music seemed to meld, holding the same
subtle dominance over the scene, enlivening everything – full of life.
If you listen closely to Misha Panfilov’s latest record, you will hear the sounds of wind propelling the music forward. A natural force breathing momentum into every aspect of these journeying compositions. As if the layered blend of dreamy woodwinds, elastic lapsteel guitar twang, thumping drums, twinkling keys, pulsing electric organ, and wordless vocal runs remain always in motion, open to breezy spontaneity, shapeshifting like the clouds caught up in Earth’s unbothered rotations.
As I listen, fixated on the cover art — the bearded wizard with wavy star-stirring fingers — I’m reminded of Aeolus, the Odyssey’s divine keeper of winds, the Zeus-appointed king who dwells with his family on a mythical floating island. In Homer’s ancient epic, Aeolus entraps all stormy gusts within tied burlap sacks, blessing Odysseus and his crew with the chance to ride a favorable zephyr homeward. Of course, that’s not how the story unfolds. The men, driven by
greed, rip open the bags, unleash the gusts, and are blasted backwards, to Aeolia.
But we are not them. Instead of seeking a specified homeland, I like to imagine us — a blessed bunch of scraggly seafaring audiophiles — sailing through the vast sonic universe Misha has been constructing over the course of a decade, allowing the dynamic winds — both blustery and mellow, howling and soft — to take us wherever the wizard chooses.
“Every composition feels like a surprise to me,” Misha once told me. “I often leave a lot of room for chance, sometimes starting with whatever I happen to have around me that day. If my music stops surprising me, it stops being fun. The final result almost never sounds the way I originally imagined it and that’s a great thing.”
In other words, sometimes it’s better to be blown off course, if only to find your way back again.
All I ask is that you slide Where The Birds Fly from its protective shell, place it gently down on your turntable, press Play, watch the needle sink into the vinyl’s outermost groove, and bask in that first snippet of crackling static. Think of wind. How it moves, its unpredictability; how it feels, a cool breeze washing over your body; and how it’s created, from pressure, from the cosmic fireball we call the sun.
Listen closely.
Accept your destination as unfixed, uncharted, and unexplainable.
Guided by the wind.
— Colin Kirkland
Don’t miss any of Misha’s (FOUR!) upcoming releases, available soon on Bandcamp and vinyl.