POETRY AND LITERATURE



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Blinded by the Sun






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    Scythes IV



    The simplicity of Daniel's music is at times disarming, take the music from Scythes IV for example, how that with just a single nylon string guitar, his poetry and voice he is able to deliver us past the barrage of barriers and propel us into the rich collective consciousness, unifying us in a suspended state of enhanced awareness, an ecstasy.

    Compare that then to the various lush, layered compositions making up Blinded by the Sun, like the title track, or "You are the Sunlight" where vocal melodies and guitar textures are woven into a lush and rhythmic aural tapestry, the result is simply sublime.

    In Daniel’s voice one hears strains of the late Jeff Buckley, Ben Harper and Caetano Veloso. It is a voice agile and aspiring, reaching for the universal, the common threads connecting all people. You get the sense also of an urgency listening to Daniel, a striving that reveals a relentlessness in his pursuit of an immediate, articulate and pure expression.

    The result is that his recordings then are more like raw jewels excavated from deep fissures, they aren't overly polished and pretty in the sense some people prefer. They are the real thing. All you have to do is listen to the soaring chorus falsettos of "Blinded by the Sun" where he wails "I've been...I've been blinded by the sun" to know that Daniel Shams is the real thing. And when he sings of love, it is not to a woman, it is to all women. It is as if the great Sibyls are resurrected at once, and one hears him with the ears of Dante's Beatrice, Faust's Gretchen or Sharazad from the Arabian Nights. When one listens they live love for that instant. When he sings "to live, to love, I want to be reborn every instant" through Daniel and his HELIOTRICITY we do these things.

    Wallace Blackie Gold

























    SITE LAST UPDATED 3/7/12