SPIRIT OF THE POSITIVE WIND
Got a nice three-CD-R-pack from the Mouthus-run Our Mouth label a while back and have been stupidly ignoring it, but finally cracked them all open (digitally speaking) this week and none disappoint. There's Big Whiskey's Semi-Brown Music, a nice pair of muffled, rattling psych/noise excursions; Lexie Mountain's Blood Shed in the Course of Things, two really excellent 18-minute collages of fractured speech, vocal garbling, and cramped noise falling in the same geo-musical region as some of Carly Ptak's solo stuff; and, the most mouth-watering of the three, a self-titled EP by Spirit of the Positive Wind, the quartet of Mouthus-men Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson, Karl Bauer (aka Axolotl), and Magik Marker/GHQ'er Pete Nolan.
Now I'm not gonna pretend that the two tracks here are some magic amalgam of these four's best moments - it would be both ridiculous to claim and unfair to expect - but I can say that I'm not totally willing to rule out the possibility quite yet. Cause both pieces have really snuck up on me this weekend - when I checked em out early in the week, they sounded rather unremarkably good, like something you'd really dig if you saw these four jamming on it in a practice space, but that you'd not really think much about afterwards - an elusive, moment-in-time sort of thing. But today I'm surprised to hear stuff I didn't hear before; both pieces actually sound quite different from what I remembered just a few days ago, especially the 16-minute second track "West Wind," which earlier felt like a collective, passive loop sort of along the lines of Mick Jagger's Moog soundtrack to Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, but now suddenly feels a lot more active. It even feels like a more subdued, beat-driven version of something from Double Leopards' great, under-appreciated Circa 1999-2001. I'm not saying it's ever gonna be some kinda epic that I return to annually, but there's a lot more happening in it than I first gave it credit for, which for me always means something...
That track's a little too long to post, but luckily the first cut, "East Wind," is almost as good. This is more like what you'd expect from the participants - lots of winding, whistling guitar noise accompanied by little semi-patters of blipping noise and chiming loops. The trebly, gravelly edge of the guitar stuff for some reason paints an image in the back of my brain of a drum-less Blue Humans, or a more stoned version of the great static noise on the Bill Orcutt solo album. Those are both strained comparisons tho - more feelings than actually literal resemblences - and anyway what's more important/cool is that the track doesn't immediately sound like Mouthus, Axolotl, or Magik Markers. It simply sounds like four fertile-minded noise-improvisers making sure not to waste the time they got to spend together, which more than justifies Our Mouth's documentation of said experience (and, hopefully, promotion of repeat occurrences...)
mp3:
SPIRIT OF THE POSITIVE WIND - "East Wind" from Spirit of the Positive Wind
Now I'm not gonna pretend that the two tracks here are some magic amalgam of these four's best moments - it would be both ridiculous to claim and unfair to expect - but I can say that I'm not totally willing to rule out the possibility quite yet. Cause both pieces have really snuck up on me this weekend - when I checked em out early in the week, they sounded rather unremarkably good, like something you'd really dig if you saw these four jamming on it in a practice space, but that you'd not really think much about afterwards - an elusive, moment-in-time sort of thing. But today I'm surprised to hear stuff I didn't hear before; both pieces actually sound quite different from what I remembered just a few days ago, especially the 16-minute second track "West Wind," which earlier felt like a collective, passive loop sort of along the lines of Mick Jagger's Moog soundtrack to Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, but now suddenly feels a lot more active. It even feels like a more subdued, beat-driven version of something from Double Leopards' great, under-appreciated Circa 1999-2001. I'm not saying it's ever gonna be some kinda epic that I return to annually, but there's a lot more happening in it than I first gave it credit for, which for me always means something...That track's a little too long to post, but luckily the first cut, "East Wind," is almost as good. This is more like what you'd expect from the participants - lots of winding, whistling guitar noise accompanied by little semi-patters of blipping noise and chiming loops. The trebly, gravelly edge of the guitar stuff for some reason paints an image in the back of my brain of a drum-less Blue Humans, or a more stoned version of the great static noise on the Bill Orcutt solo album. Those are both strained comparisons tho - more feelings than actually literal resemblences - and anyway what's more important/cool is that the track doesn't immediately sound like Mouthus, Axolotl, or Magik Markers. It simply sounds like four fertile-minded noise-improvisers making sure not to waste the time they got to spend together, which more than justifies Our Mouth's documentation of said experience (and, hopefully, promotion of repeat occurrences...)
mp3:
posted by MM at 10:40 PM
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