“Words are words, but as far as the idea of meaning communicated through words, I feel like there’s a thing that music is trying to get at that’s beneath the words.” So says wizard-bearded David Golightly as he sits in front of a campfire. “The Translinguistic Other,” Emily Pothast says, finishing Golightly’s thought. She is drinking a Rainier and wearing a wonderfully witchy black dress. “With good music, it’s like bumping into that transcendental thing that’s at the end of words.” Pothast and Golightly’s curatorial eye for metaphysical music has spawned one of Seattle’s most exciting labels, Translinguistic Other. Pothast and Golightly’s Central District home serves as the label’s HQ, which houses a veritable library of actual 13th-century illuminated manuscripts, anthologies of occult mystic texts, and a stockpile of beautifully crafted LPs and tapes from the Northwest’s most trance-inducing bands. Groups on the label, including Geist & The Sacred Ensemble, Swahili, and Pothast and Golightly’s own Midday Veil, are bound less by a common sound than by a shared conceptual basis—interfacing with that “Translinguistic Other” through ritualistic music. “[The music] has this different spiritual tone,” Pothast says. “It’s more comfortable with death, more comfortable with dark, feminine, nighttime lunar places.”
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