Tuesday, March 27, 2018

REVIEW: Little Songs of the Mutilated!



This is not an album review, but a review of a series of albums.   It's the old Exquisite Corpse surrealist game, but musical rather than visual.  This was a series that I loved so much that, after I wrote the article, I wrote to the honcho running the series and asked him if I could join in on the fun.  And he said yes!  So now, even though I was completely unassociated with the collective at the time of writing, now I've actually played a live gig with them and am featured on the next album to be released (but still unreleased at this stage).  Cool and exciting world!

Review written for Heathen Harvest, and probably edited by the tireless and unflagging Sage Weatherford.

"The diversity of sounds here is amazing, ranging from synth-driven electroscapes to percussion-heavy abstract neo-shamanism, and from full-on noise to cut-up media shenanigans to reverb-drenched plink-plonkiness, and everything in between. Yet, this breadth of palette is restrained—and made even more powerful—by the game-structure, which sees ten or fifteen seconds of one fragment directly influence and inspire the next, meaning that these pieces each flow with a beautiful fluidity. Tonal washes rise up out of beds of clanking, noise sections erupt up like lava from landscapes of tinkling, acoustic sounds emerge from a fog of synthetic ones, and all of it is perfectly natural. The Game framework of these pieces means that every sound that occurs makes sense in the context of the previous ones, as players take the sounds of the artists before them and warp them into something new–and, because of the strict time limits placed on each piece, this all happens in the space of a fucking pop-song.

Read the actual full review here!

 

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