The Fredösphere

This post has choral content.  Stay with me.

Today I received a very disturbing email from Jeff, an old, trusted friend.  This is a guy who is a Christian believer, one deeply committed to orthodoxy in his theology.  He is simply the last person on earth I would expect to apostatize.  He wrote me an email with the subject of "Weird. Interesting. Fascinating. Magnetic."

Have you heard about/seen this group [called The Polyphonic Spree]? I happened to be channel surfing one night, and caught one of their pieces on Austin City Limits. I think it lasted 10 minutes at least ("It's the Sun" or something like that).
 
I couldn't figure out if they were eastern mystics, or some kind of cult, or just making fun of it, or what. But I couldn't turn it off (Tracey was insisting...she was claiming it was demonic, but I told her I thought they might be making fun of something). The combination of visual experience (weird jerky synchronized motions) with the odd music just sucked me in.

Is it a cult? Jeff is not exactly the first person to ask the question. Regarding Jeff's wife's warning (a hypothesis which has not yet been disproved):  the content-free lyrics leads me to doubt they are of the devil.  Basically, it's half prog rock, half groovy mysterioso*, and half peace & love music from the 60s, but with better synthesizers.

On The Other Hand -- did not our teachers warn us of this kind of thing?  As it is written in the Screenplay to Broadcast News:

Don't get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the devil. Think about it. He won't hurt anyone, and he will charm everyone, and he will just make us lower our standards.

The experts at Yahoo who devote their lives to studying this kind of thing reluctantly conclude that band founder Tim DeLaughter is not a cult leader -- indeed, he has only one wife (so far).  Perhaps the factoid that sums it up best is that they have performed in a Unitarian Church -- which proves just how sinister -- and benign -- they are.

I wrote most of this post while listening to (and under the influence of) the downloadable music loop from the band's website -- over and over and over.  I could not take my ears off of it.  It's music to chew Prozac by.  The band has 24 members and its sound is dependent on a mass of voices singing in unison or very simple polyphony -- just enough to protect them from getting hassled by consumer protection groups over some kind of truth-in-labeling dispute.  And it's a choir.  So I'm justified in devoting a post to them.

Mr. Fredosphere, sir?  Since when did you ever act as though any of the confused drivel you post needed justifying?

I am both more and less serious about this than you think.  Confused?  Not as much as I am. Maybe we should let Umie the Umlaut have the last word:

Umie says, "Hey now it's the sun and it makes me smile All around, all around! Ba dada ba da!"

Uh-oh. We lost him.

*Henry Mancini gave the Theme To The Pink Panther the expression marking "groovy mysterioso."  Something that cool sticks in you memory forever.  If you're me.