Label: Touch Format: CD
Clocking in at a nadge over quarter of an hour long, Live At Revolver, Melbourne makes up for its shortness with some intensity instead. The whines and drones of clickety-snickety underpinnings meet tones at fifty paces then closing to quarters more uncomfortable. These things should sometimes be kept at arms length, but bringing the sound of what resembles a wardrobe being manhandled into a coal cellar this close to the ears can be enjoyable up to a point.
That point is probably about right at the length presented here. Hypnosis is acheived, interventions made and proposed, the texture of hiss and decay propounded on the bones of rhythm and melody just about gets remembered like a distant cousin. There are guitars resident in the cloacum of rendered acoustic transformation, but they don’t stand a chance against the forces of sputter and disc-error scrum which evolves into purgative electronic outburts; which is as it should be on such occasions.
One of the key lessons of this unrestrained noise-chunder format is knowing when enough is enough for the audience or listener if not the performer; so easy to misjudge, to collapse into the delights of letting freeform spats of the kind of noise your grandmother wouldn’t like unless she happened to be Alice Coltrane fly free. Even if it was time restraints which brought about the limit to this performance, such are the benefits of restriction. As the downward coast in territories of less opprobrious earache engenderment suggest closure, it is to Christian Fennesz‘ considerable credit that it’s with a flitter of fond farewell rather than endurance that the CD concludes.
-Antron S. Meister-
