pneuma

A favorite word of his is pneuma: “the breath of life,” in Greek, which he first learned in one of his religion classes.

We leave the realm of biography and information, and we experience breath, pneuma, life itself.

“I suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, the pneuma enthusiastikon, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.”

Similarly, Tool’s latest material — “Pneuma,” “Invincible” and the new record’s title track were among the fresh tunes offered up — had the same mix of dense droning notes and constant time changes as the band’s earliest output.

“She’s dead, yes, but there’s breath, there’s pneuma, there’s birdsong!”