Paleolithic Hunting Club: Kicking Around on a Piece of Ground in Your Hometown

In Cloud Orbit’s sound expands into an infinite dreamscape twisting and folding through a vast matrix of possible meanings and perceptions that are left for the listener to interpret. Part of the charm of In Cloud Orbit is the sensation of being dropped into the wilderness of human experience while making the journey to find meaning and peace of mind. The ultimate truth is, that there is no ultimate truth, but only the universal struggle that every conscious entity faces.

If you’re a musician you know the drill. Often the best part of being in a band is the planning stages. It starts as an idea. A great band name is a reason to start a band. But then anything past that point is less fun, and then you have other people involved and they all have something to say about it and day jobs, kids, and obligations…if your lucky you get to the point where you put out an album. There are so many things to derail a band. Even if you are a genuinely good band with good songs, the odds are that it’s not going to work out. In the end if you write a few good songs, that’s not too bad. You can always take those songs to another project. The moral is persistence; you have to keep at it.

I actually forgot about this conversation that took place in the spring of 2015. It featured friends of mine in a local Detroit area band called In Cloud Orbit. We had big plans, a record in the works, I was writing some copy for the band and planning singles, press releases, and bios and then things sort of fizzled out as they tend to do sometimes. The good news though is that as bands and projects get named and renamed and different people contribute and move on, the main thing is persistence and I’m happy to say they are still at it, though I’m not sure to what official capacity or what “it” is called, but the point is they are still writing and recording music and growing as artists and that is all that matters.

In Cloud Orbit is less of a band, than an introspective journey through the collective unconscious via sound. Their sound carelessly floats by painting different shades of color across the sky casting different hues of color and shadow that are unique to each person’s perspective. They defy traditional songwriting by putting the lyrics second and using the vocals as an instrument to evoke the desired emotion. Guitar player and vocalist Jeremy Ravezzani explains: “I like to put effects on my voice to slightly hide what is being said in some parts. That way, you can lose yourself in what is being created and not necessarily in what is being sung.” A band like In Cloud Orbit could only come out of a small town where noticing the careless surrounding natural beauty is ingrained in your DNA. The band is from the small hamlet enclave of Romeo, north of Detroit, a town that prides itself for hanging on to it’s farming roots. Keyboardist and guitar player Alex Smith explains, our location has isolated us from a lot of the music scene around us, so we’ve never really paid attention to any trends happening around us and focused on making music that came naturally.” Ravezzani explains further about the philosophy about what drives him to create music:

My inspiration is my spirituality and constant endeavor to get through the layers of being a human being and remember that I am an infinite conscious frequency. Being a yogi, I am practicing the art of transforming myself through self-awareness. These thoughts and practices are what I personify through my music. I use the battle the ego wages on our pure soul as material to almost transmute the turmoil within into music…In my belief that everything is just flowing through different levels of frequency and vibration and the music that I create is also creating a frequency and its own vibration, I can use this to heighten my connection to something greater, something beyond me.

I put a few tracks from a bootleg of a hometown show into this episode where In Cloud Orbit has their “Beatles rooftop moment” playing at a gas station corner in downtown Romeo. You can hear all of the motorcycles and fireworks in the background adding a real late summer flavor to these recordings making them one of my favorite fly-on-wall recordings of all time.

All proper contextual Background aside, below is an excerpt of the conversation that we had. Ravezzani discusses his lyrical approach (Transcribed from the conversation):

My own opinion, like when certain bands capture me I’m either trying to figure out how they’re creating their sound and I know a lot of people prefer to hear a story or lyrics or something they can relate to mentally. Let’s say they hear me say, “I was in a sad spot one day” or whatever and they say, “oh so was I” and they’re thinking that. Then they’re not feeling the emotion of what we’re creating musically. I feel like that’s the bigger thing. I like using my voice to sing less words and use it more as an instrument to make an audible noise of how I feel rather than having words.

People attach to bands that emit a feeling or resurrect something they’re unaware of like happiness, joy, or depression or whatever, it is people. Humans want to express whatever feeling they are feeling and I feel a lot of times when they find a band maybe I’m just being pretentious when I find a band, I want them to be mine. I found them when I was in this spot in my life...I love when you find accurate lyrics for bands because you start hearing things through that song your like, I think he’s saying this because I was in this mode, this moment of when I was listening to them and I almost heard him singing that to me so it’s almost like he’s finding you or she’s finding you whomever you are listening to, and I want to recreate that, I want to recreate more of a personal experience rather than everyone just knowing the lyrics. Know what I mean? I don’t know if that is weird or not.