Label: Aalfang Format: CD
Bit of a weird one, this – even by the usual standards. It consists of two tracks, the first (“Geschwärtzte Milch” – blackened milk) lasting four minutes long and sounding a bit like late Swans in strummy guitar instrumental mode, and the second (the title track) being three quarters of an hour long and comprising a textbook example of Surrealistic klang-honk-tinkle-“boo!” Electroacoustic tomfoolery in the same zany tradition as Nurse With Wound, Roger Doyle and Bladder Flask. It’s not often you describe something as “zany” and mean it as a compliment. They sound a bit like all those IRCAM types like Xenakis and Oliveros, only without being so stuffy and academic – like dinner music for a pack of hungry coprophiliacs, or Tex Avery directing the Comte de Lautreamont. Perhaps that makes them wacky too.
“Mezethakia Mukabalatt” seems to be divided into named sections, although it’s not entirely obvious where these start and end, and the names are in some made-up language that looks like a hybrid of Finnish, Turkish and Thai, only with more ümläüts. The liner notes implore you to listen with the windows wide open, and this illustrates what I like about this CD that really annoyed me about Toop and Eastley‘s superficially-similar Doll Creature last year. That CD was totally overwhelmed by environmental noise and left sounding less interesting than the passing traffic. This one on the other hand takes the surrounding ambience and makes it its own. As I write this, a handyman is putting up shelves just behind me, and the current passage on the CD contains the sounds of waves and the voices of children. But the banging and sawing doesn’t sound at all out of place. How they’ve pulled that off I don’t know.
In amongst the organised chaos are occasional, striking moments of sheer beauty, brought to you on piano, violin, guitar or the gentle vibrations of oscillators stretched out to whalesong lengths. In turn sinister and endearing, startling and comforting, you will be taken through such a richness of emotional vignettes over the course of forty-six minutes that it’s impossible not to like this remarkable creation. Listen with your mind wide open.
-Andrew Clegg-
