Cardinal Fuzz And Feeding Tube records are proud to bring to you ‘Divination’, a medical diary turned psychedelic séance where Jake Blanchard summons the shahi baaja from somewhere beneath the skin. Jake is perhaps best known for his remarkable visual work, having created sleeves and artwork for artists including Pelt, Mike Gangloff and Richard Dawson, with his artwork for Dawson's The Ruby Cord receiving third place in the 2022 Art Vinyl album-cover awards.
Jake Blanchard plays the electric shahi baaja, that beautiful beast of an instrument sitting somewhere between the Indian bulbul tarang, the Japanese taishōgoto and an electrical nervous system caught in a thunderstorm. Under normal circumstances it already sounds like an object with one foot in this world and another somewhere considerably stranger. In Jake's hands it becomes something else again, a machine for pulling sounds out of the walls.
Jake has been undergoing complex surgery and the circumstances of that process have inevitably found their way into the music. The titles alone read like fragments from some deranged medieval physician's notebook: Coffee, Codeine, Turmeric, Turkey Tail. Biomechanical Burden. Scan Divination. Bone Marrow. This is not wellness music. This is ritual music for when the body has become an unruly piece of machinery. The album was shaped around Jake's routine with the music assembled in the spaces that illness, pain, medication, scans and recovery allowed. What emerges is a strange kind of alchemical diary, part pharmacopoeia, part exorcism, part electrical weather system.
The artwork by Jake depicts a magnificent psychedelic medicine man surrounded by smoke, strange creatures, eyes, instruments, food, candles, books, potions and enough unexplained symbolism to keep a conspiracy theorist awake for several weeks. It feels less like an album cover than an instruction manual for entering the record. It is the sound of an artist looking directly at the machinery of his own body and deciding to make a record from the noise. Divination is the answer.
