My Review: Julian Cope - I Dream the Cosmos Atavistic

 Julian Cope - I Dreamt the Cosmos Atavistic

To witness only a part of the possibilities available to us means limiting our consciousness, stopping knowledge in a place where the flows seem to exclude anything else. This concept applies to all forms of life. In music, we have examples of insights that are not accepted or known, and are scattered in the mechanisms described at the beginning. The discomfort of commitment, of internalisation, of unease that provides different information is not usually practised.

Here we find ourselves discussing a work that strips away what we are accustomed to consuming, with a celestial installation conducted primarily at a slow pace, dispersing musical clichés and every form that is generally considered appealing, easy, and fluid in its digestion.

Julian Cope's new album is a skilful rebellion, entirely rooted in the luminous mantra created by the contact between the heavens and the musician's mind, here engaged in translating spirituality and research into a generous work of connections, in which the studio is a giant lens that makes every detail described seem tiny. Minimalist, expansive, energetic and misleading, these three tracks are a wonderful exploration of images that cannot be photographed through immobility, but rather through the continuous X-ray of introspection that leaves input and questions in the brain.

The degree of total indifference in every reception is remarkable: we find ourselves with our senses on edge, with fear, with the sky advancing like a snail into our selves, unaware of the enormous power of this exercise. What seem to be bombastic, annoying, boring and uninteresting noises are in fact the mechanisms that we silence, disown, ignore and do not nurture. The spectacular aspect is the whispers, the slow streams of sound that suddenly appear and then immediately disappear: a challenge to logic and patience, a sensationally intelligent spite capable of exploring the invisible.  

And when suddenly the compositions diverge from the long minutes that preceded them, in which everything seemed set in stone, there is the cunning of a change of colour, of gear, which also offers a growing narrative tension, in which the perspective draws uncertainties and tremors.

An use of the theory of bewilderment in a manner typical of silent cinema, but without subtitles... 

Everything is landscape, uninhabited and solemn, with theatrical hypnosis that stores our reactions to make them pathetic: Julian smiles mockingly, with his solemn meditation, his mantras and his glaciers moving towards a black hole that we do not immediately perceive. But it is precisely this dark space that turns on the light bulb, making our fear of light, of fake melody, of our way of understanding music, practicable within us. 

A fruitful study leads us to write down our reactions as we listen, as if we were both patients and psychologists, with the truth maturing, listening again and again to this permeating flow. Our thoughts become a spaceship, flying beneath the ocean, swimming in the ice tongues of Everest, walking in the lava of a volcano and dying on contact with the first comet encountered.

The trance-like state we experience breaks down our defences, does not produce addiction and colours our perceptions, transporting us into a state of wonder when we hear the Liverpool artist's voice utter the words of the title, during Psalm Zero, in a semi-song that becomes emotional and hormonal therapy for this penetrable and impenetrable artistic prodigy: everything depends on our mental and physical elasticity.

A terrifying prospect for comedy lovers, stuck in a metal chair, with fragments of sound penetrating our every reaction: IDTCA is torture that dilates the blood and turns the mind into a spring, in a final leap that makes us forget our ignorance... 

Who Put All Of This is a spiritual settlement in search of a plot, using sounds that move in an industrial area, noises and electric shocks inside a forest that raises its nose towards the night sky, with an ethereal final expansion.

Stargarden reveals darkness, in a gloomy and slow search for a loop that, magically, never arrives. Severa advances with a bombastic note, like a microscope analysing every particle of the psyche, in a thirty-minute analytical session in which silence offers silver stars...

Psalm Zero is a horror film that benefits from Julian's voice, free to express a thickening of the harmonic plot, an orderly chaos, with an industrial attitude in the chromosomes of an ambient genre, like an impossible-to-avoid crossroads. Electronic tracks shake up the journey and we find ourselves in a spatial whirlwind.

An animalistic work, in which the elements of nature arrive in the place furthest removed from any modern expression of the concept of music. Everything clashes, involving hard work and patience, inflicting a powerful defeat on undeserving taste and sowing the hope of a metamorphosis that will restore the ancient role of listening. Not a sterile anachronism, but an invitation to slow down, even in music, the rhythms, the human perversions, to bring us back into contact with our surroundings, like a secular observation of creation.

It is not artistic courage, crisis, madness or anything else, but rather a trespassing into the places where a more secure and balanced soul is constructed. Sensible, majestic, oppressive in a truly celestial way (to create allegories, metaphors and flows of selected energies), this is truly an authentic work of abandonment and distance...

Simply a monumental journey of aggregations and rejections, from which we can only depart to immerse our tears in the irrigation channels of our minds...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22 January 2026

https://merchandiser.headheritage.co.uk/products/i-dream-the-cosmos-atavistic

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxOdPtLRV6i3MbQ5KAM4sRZXNMXRBLK7P