Mouths/Haptic - IV2E/Danjon Scale

Entr’acte
E37

Now, if Tarantino and Rodriguez were really cool, they’d have used the music from this split LP for their split flick, Grindhouse. But no, this marvelous set is relegated to a 200 copy printing, to languish in obscurity until someone hits on it in 2036. In the meantime, however, any of you folk out there with a turntable should latch onto it pronto; it’s a fine, fine record.

Mouths is Jon Mueller, Jim Schoenecker and, for this live performance, Werner Moebius. “IV2E” is 15 or so minutes of intense, deep flutter, burrowing dronage and waylaid radio folded into one helluva piece. It’s an accretive work, simple enough in structure in that layers emerge (sometimes added, sometimes just hoving into the foreground), levels of detail multiply and volume increases. It’s unfailingly interesting and gripping, the initial propeller-like thrum grabbing a hold somewhere in your bowels and twisting. There’s a bunch of percussion hidden back there as well, both scrapings and thuds, that adds a crucial, grainy seasoning to the affair. Beautiful ending as well, in a small flurry of quiet clicks and a rhythmic squeak. Powerful work, makes me wish I had been there.

Haptic’s “Danjon Scale” equally engaging, maybe a little subtler. Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Mills and Steven Hess lay out a quarter hour of roiling undertow, seemingly derived from metal (cymbals, gongs) and electronics. The promo humorously describes it as “a larded unfurling of sonorous information”. Larded, eh? Well, it certainly has heft, but I detect no particular greasiness (though an alternate definition offers, “with added detail”). The thing broods, though, sits there and ruminates, slowly uncoiling and re-clenching, maybe getting a little pissed off. Though it gradually becomes massive, the payoff, for this listener, is the final couple of minutes where the central drone dissipates and you’re left with only the ashes and echoes, a wonderfully chilly sense of desolation. The Danjon Scale, I learned, measures lunar brightness during eclipses. Hidden moon luminescence; I could think of worse visual analogies for this music.

Along with the recent Yoshimura disc, this is my favorite new listening of the first months of the year. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

entr’acte