There are times in life when fate just seems to be outside the door. In a monthly scour of Bandcamp, I happened upon the digital release of Psychosemantics by the young Patrick Coppola and was immediately sucked in. I listened and listened to his elongated musical stretch and was saddened to find no physical release. Not but a moment after closing my browser window but did I receive an email from Mr. Coppola explaining he’s new, nice, and would soon have a tape release of a new album he just released digitally. Whatever spirit moved both of us at that time was a special sort; the same specialness that courses through Psychosemantics. Its permeations, which Coppola insists were many, are just as plentiful from song to song. Opener “Peregrinations” exists in the caterwaul between the shift from Microphones to Mount Eerie; a moody climax of mountainous treachery. Follow-up “Cabin Six” a brooding Wooden Wand outtake from Harem of the Sundrum…. “I Let it Happen” a mutated Magnog re-appropriation, spacey and alien in its rudimentary delivery before devolving into a pop confessional. Though none of the narratives of Psychosemantics seem to fit together, this is my fault — and that of those who believe albums must have some minor semblance of subject matter. I choose to believe that is an artist’s discretion whether an album exists as a concept in relativity or abstraction. It’s the album’s eponymous finale where the trials of Psychosemantics truly take place, and though it first sounds shambolic, by its end it becomes a manifest of the clever machinations of outsider Coppola to come.
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