ERIK JONSUN

Smoking Mirror

By Lee Underwood

14 January, 2009

Once in a while, a man arises from among us who is at once a warrior, a poet, and a first-class musician. Erik Jonsun is such a man. In his life and music, he merges the ancient samurai qualities of courage, grace, intelligence, poetry, muscle, fire and fortitude. His war: Iraq, where he was severely wounded. His poetry: the lyrics he writes. His music: The Seeded Planet: Smoking Mirror EP and the “Time of the Assassins” single.

Jonsun plays a 12-string guitar and sings his own songs with fierce rock ‘n’ roll energy, gut-level intensity, and diamondfire intelligence. He infuses every phrase with strength and integrity, backed by power-packed bass, keyboards, multiple guitars, and drums. Hypnotic atmospheres arise like swirling smoke from influences as diverse as Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Jim Morrison, Tim and Jeff Buckley, and Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, the music is very much his own — "My art is not about compromise,” he said. “My art is about vision. Unyielding vision."

In Smoking Mirror’s musically forceful “Nameless,” perhaps alluding to some of his experiences in Iraq, he sings, “I know the name of the nameless/ I’ve seen the face of the faceless/ I’ve traveled the road to the tower/ I know my end and the hour. . . . In the desert green/night vision reigns/ you shoot at men who served you tea.”

Indeed, the proximity of death to life can be frightening, even as it can be exhilarating. In “Nameless” he sings, “I’ll get through the gate when I make it/I’ll see the light when I’m naked.” In a different context, he quotes Jim Morrison’s line, “Break on Through to the Other Side” and then says in his own words, “But it ain’t easy. In fact, the Gate kills a lot of people.” But daring to pass through the gate “to the other side” is what courage and artistic creativity are all about — and Jonsun does not back away.

In “Mexico,” he walks across borders in the snow, trying hard to remember a woman left behind, but he can’t, because Mexico is not “the wasteland ruined north.” He travels “through storied jungles/jaguars of stone” in an effort “to find the road” to wisdom, peace and sanity. The music is rich and sensual, as mysterious and dramatic as it is potent.

“Whispering,” a rock ballad, is a love song to a woman (and perhaps to Death?) who said she would wait for him. But he refuses to follow the siren song she sings, “C’mon along, let’s leave this life/We’ll all be there sometime.”

Although the atmosphere of Smoking Mirror is often dark and brooding, it is also loaded with compassion, love, energetic anger, and joy. Neither war nor daily life is one-dimensional. Each is a synthesis of life and death. In one of his best songs, the single “Time of the Assassins,” death is “the violence that saved and created you/ it is the time of the assassins/it’s the time to take chances,” for, “we make our own sun, sun, sun. . .”

In a different but related context, Jonsun has affirmed, "When we die we are released, returned in an instant to the truest, most infinite realities. So real, the shock splinters our identity and ego into a million stars. Only for a moment do we witness a lifetime of fear and worry. Then laugh and swim into eternity. Toward a much grander adventure. But with stories to tell of our beautiful crazy day on Earth."

Jonsun’s emotionally intense music simultaneously transcends emotion to attain a still higher level. "Art is sacred,” he says. “It is not a business. It was sacred before the Enlightenment. And to the sacred it will return.”

Jonsun’s awakened mind and his engrossing music contain many vivid images from the battlefield, plus a treasure chest of experiences he has gleaned from listening to music throughout his life and reading dozens of top-flight writers. In addition to influences cited above, his comrades in creativity include: synthesist Steve Roach, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Oliver Stone, Jack Kerouac, Bob Marley, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Neil Young, John Cage, Eddie Vedder, Krishnamurti, artist Alex Grey, and writer Ken Wilber.

In both music and life, Jonsun is a man of complementary unities, which give his music a special luminosity. "I watched vehicles and people disappear,” he wrote on his site. “I watched mortars land and bloom like green electric trees through night vision goggles." He has also said, "I am interested in revolution. But the sort of revolution proposed by Krishnamurti. A revolution from within more so than without. A revolution of the self more so than an ‘other.’"

Now in the prime of his manhood, Jonsun is physically strong and mentally aflame. He managed to survive not only Iraq, but the internal conflicts and confusions that afflict every intelligent person under forty. Bring it all together, and we see today that he has full strength, full power, and tons of expressive energy that has already produced Smoking Mirror and “Time of the Assassins.”

Erik Jonsun’s got creative fire in his soul. I think people are going to be awakened to him before very long. Some already are — and more are on the way.

Lee Underwood, former West Coast Editor of Down Beat. Author: Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered. Solo pianist: Gathering Light. Web site: leeunderwood.net.