The Burning Bright Light brings together the American free improvising trio Dromedaries of sax and synth player Keir Neuringer (of Irreversible Entanglements), double bass player Shayna Dulberger and drummer-electronic player Julius Masri (this trio already released four albums) with Philadelphia-based vocalist-poet Alexoteric, aka Alex smith, who describes himself as a speculative fiction writer, collage artist, and vocalist, whose work is a «vessel for the spiritual, political, and psychosocial ushering of queer Black people into a future informed by our cultural needs and shaped by our dreams and imagination».

The Burning Bright Light was composed and recorded in real-time, with no rules set in advance, by the quartet and recorded at Rittenhouse Sound Works in Philadelphia ((home to notable recent recordings from Sun Ra Arkestra and Irreversible Entanglements, among others) in October 2022 and was produced by Masri. It features five, epic, thought-provoking, freestyle spoken word meets sci-fi, dense cinematic soundscapes that reference rich underground writing, the liberatory Afro-American free jazz tradition, and playful avant-garde experimentation.

It is almost impossible to encompass the myriad of poetic and literary, subversive cultural, and political references of Alexoteric, delivered with great charisma and authority, and vocal acrobatics. The wise and urgent, soulful and propulsive, collaborative free improvised music of Dromedaries elevates Smith’s ecstatic delivery and his evocative texts to the position of a spiritual cosmic orator, second only to Sun Ra.

Smith himself suggests his own expansive description of The Burning Bright Light as a: «future color spray, a hidden missive laser etched into the seams of your galactic multi-death cult corporation flight jacket, the snow fallen ash and embers of a world you can only view through a prism-powered holo-sim. Wild jazz, bad, fresh with no jive—the perfect script for the download digital age, transcending experimental musics through the solar battery at the bio-borg filling station. The anti-Boeing, proto-mothership, swinging the body eclectic, crash landing on a brass planet. Dromedaries are plugged in and transforming, delivering ancient spells like slam poetry on Cybertron».

Dromedaries x Alexoteric promise and deliver a wild ride of social, political, and cosmic, spiritual Afro-futurist free jazz and poetry.

Eyal Hareuveni

Alexoteric aka Alex Smith (voice, texts), Shayna Dulberger (double bass), Julius Masri (drums, electronics), Keir Neuringer (saxophone, synthesizer, percussion)