6. Eden AhbezEden’s Island
Once touring Songs For Our Mothers was finally done with, I relocated to Cambodia for several months with the express desire of listening to this record in a more fitting environ than those available to me in northern Europe. I eventually found myself living in a little shack near a place called Sihanoukville, on a kind of hippy beach running up the coast called Otres 1. Otres 2 was slightly further up the road. In Otres 2 you could have someone bring a drink to your room, you could pay for an actual massage, that kind of thing. You could pay for the other type, too. There were a great many Chinese tourists up there. Otres 1 was bedraggled, the people there were, much like myself, a kind of druggy detritus that had washed up where the price of a drink was negligible and you could buy pills over the bar. Repeatedly I would try and push eden ahbez onto the people I’d meet. Late in the evening, especially. Folks really couldn’t get on board with it. There we were, in southeast Asia, the sun, a little pot of molten copper, peaking over the horizon at the break of day, the palm trees, the pacific, and still, no dice… turn this depressing shit off. If it weren’t for psytrance, I would never have left, I would still be there, in one of those bars, trying to convince myself I had no regrets.
