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Runaway Totem — Creators
(Black Widow BWR 265, 2023, CD / LP)

by Henry Schneider, Published 2025-06-06

Creators Cover art

My one and only other encounter with Runaway Totem was their 2018 album La Traccia, an experimental avant-garde release. Somehow I missed their next album, 2019’s Multiversal Matter. And judging by their new album Creators, which is a continuation of Multiversal Matter, it’s quite a departure from La Traccia. Runaway Totem is Roberto “Cahal” Gottardi’s musical project. For Creators he enlisted some interesting guests from the prog community: David Jackson (Van der Graaf Generator), Nik Turner (Hawkwind, who apparently stayed very active right up to the end of his days), and Martin Grice (Delirium). Creators is a concept album divided into two parts:  CREATORS (“Viators,” “Advent Deus,” “Betelgeuse,” and “Lemuria”) and RED STAR (“The Gate of Orion,” “Remembering Betelgeuse”, “The Spiral,” “Universal Union,” and the CD bonus track “L’Alchimista”). The constellation Orion is my favorite constellation, but I had no idea of the mysticism associated with the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and the constellation itself until I started researching these tracks. Betelgeuse is the second brightest star in the constellation Orion, marking the eastern shoulder of the hunter and its name derives from the Arabic term bat al-jawzāʾ, which means “the giant’s shoulder.” But now it gets weird and esoteric — the constellation Orion allegedly approximates the Gates of Jerusalem layout. It appears that the Earthly Mt. Zion, the City of the King, is laid out in astronomical and mathematical precision. It is no accident where the Gates are placed where certain buildings or ‘Domes’ are erected. These alignments take into consideration the curvature of Earth and slight angular adjustment to reflect the approximate proportion of the star to gate correlation. Which all leads us to Creators. The music is an instrumental amalgamation of progressive rock, jazz fusion, and an undercurrent of space rock. The first four tracks concern the intergalactic journey of alien lifeforms to Earth via the constellation Orion. Then the five RED STAR tracks reveal the subsequent arrival of other alien lifeforms, departing from Orion using these same interstellar portals to arrive on Earth with their desire to genetically manipulate the first aliens to create a slave race, which then leads to the creation of a pro-life race and a divine human. This wild and imaginative creation story that is definitely not rooted in the Bible. The music is good and best enjoyed without trying to figure out how it is connected to the mysticism and this outlandish sci-fi story.

Filed under: New releases, 2023 releases

Related artist(s): Runaway Totem, Nik Turner, David Jackson

 

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