Holed up in a depot at the edge of town, Spanish colonial shrouded in a tropical garden's lush verdure — some vast swaying network of bananas and palms, cycads and ferns all consorted to capture the morning's last lingering mist in the cool impasto of a midsummer frieze — laid out in broad strokes against the sweeping expanse of a high desert panorama, stretched out in all directions like a proscenium's arch across the deep blue technicolor horizon. There's a whole world tucked away in there, teeming with discoveries waiting to be made and lives lived in elegant motion... and it's all happening right now at the edge of town.
Palm Grove is the place and its space is set by the cool of the floor's terracotta tiles laid out in a matrix of burnt sienna, incense hanging in the air like wisps of ancient memory just at the edge of perception, drifting through the ether like voices from another age. Laid back on a Turkish rug in deep blue maroon and gold, eyes closed and soaking up the sounds of Future Days as they dance around the room in solarized shadows while the ceiling plays out stories of its own, a round trip ticket through inner space and offworld visions on a magic carpet of the mind.
Back there in the lab — the second room on the left — with banks of sleek black synthesizers and racks arrayed in parallel, rhythm boxes in shifting motion and the lonely machine hum spooling out across the Ramona 707 to echo off into the night, smoke rings rising three feet over the highway and stretching out for miles beyond. Sounds of Innerspace spinning off the decks to glide in swirling rhythm all around, cloaking the room in blacklight neon while notes hang in the air like some casual constellation, Deason’s dreams spoke into being now move through the world of their own clockwork accord.
Those Intercity travels out on Highway 67 — San Diego’s unspoken Autobahn — an all-hours open invitation to cruise the countryside in a craft of your choosing, over mountains lodged like shards of glass between the thunderclouds, past shimmering lakes that reflect the sky in deep evergreen blues, and on further still through the desert's long late afternoon shadows tripping across the sand to the beat of Beyond The Heavens, loops within loops like some gyroscopic architecture crafted in pure sound. Time passes quickly on the road and it all melts into the slipstream of your mind, carving a path up into the stars.
Drift into a coastal veldt somehow scooped up from the shoreline and landed fifty miles interior, nestled deep within the mountains and obscured by clouds like some Western Shangri-La, the sounds of Cosmic Messenger winding up toward the sky through the oaks and rocks and pines. High speed over highway and Bushflange coming through the system, hugging the turns in slate blue stealth to pass the last crossing point in an evergreen blur as a lone tarantula moves in graceful slow motion across the cool grey surface of asphalt mirroring overcast skies, a snapshot gone in seconds as the sagebrush and manzanita stream by.
Destination arrives soon enough turning out from the two lane road, trips back and forth on foot to settle on the shores of Lake Cuyamaca, possessions laid out like a private den among the trees and sand and stone. A place to think and write and dream, to soak up the sounds of a world in twilight motion. Night falls and distant city lights cast an electric glow behind mountains sleeping in silhouette, a great luminous arc stretched out above like some halo melting into starry skies and the analogue moonlight. “As Time Goes By (Sitting Under A Tree)”, the scene set to More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art, on loan from some lonely night at the turn of the century.
Campfire burning at the water's edge and the frogs sing songs of their own, rising from the marsh inside beads of percussion set adrift on the cool stillness of an evening breeze. The animals are out tonight, walking in rhythm with spirits all around to the pulse of Red Planet’s Ghostdancer, its great arcs of cybernetic jazz sailing across the valley in a warm hypnodelic glow. Creatures move in slow-shuttered grace against magnetic hues of darkness, their silhouettes traced in dim iridescence leaving trails of fading color in their wake like echoes in the analogue moonlight, and the fractals spiral on and on and on...