Saturday, May 26, 2012

Mooseifer - Welcome To Amnesia Street




I expect that a music fan will like a challenge, so I want you to imagine that you're in a band (PROTIP: for reference, use your band), and you make a song. You're quite proud of your song, proud enough to want to include it in a future album. Now, the twist is that you're in a prog band and it's the 70s, so the xylophone solo alone is a whopping 20 minutes long, and the rest is another 50. Unsurprisingly, you aren't able to fit that into one 25 minute LP side. And since the song was originally conceived as a 3:30 minute single, and then somehow extended itself, no one had actually considered the question of how the listeners were to hear it. Now you were pretty frustrated when that happened in your imagination, huh?

Then the thought came: “Hey, if it took us half the song's length in time to compose that 70 minute thing, being brilliant and all, we can probably make an album's worth of shorter songs before the release date of the original album”. A roar of weed-smelling unanimous agreement ensues, the guitarist plays Something, the vocalist mumbles a verse about swords and portals and dragons, and 10 minutes later, the album's done. It's hypothetically released a week later as a collection of accomplished 8-minute semi-epics and is hypothetically received to a rumble of praise and devotion. What the hypothetical people didn't notice back then was that while the tracks made sense individually, you couldn't really think of them as parts of a whole. In terms of flow, the album was a mess, but it didn't really matter. You only got to listen to the same music for up to 25 minutes without pause anyway.

Now fast-forward to 1985. Your band (let's give it a proggy name. How about Philosophorgy?) is seeing some surprisingly consistent success. You've headlined tours, signed autographs, become selective of your groupies, the lot. Meanwhile the CD format is beginning to gain traction. So, to celebrate, you decide to finally record and release that 70 minute song from when you guys started. You unleash your most ambitious creation to the world, and the world wishes you hadn't. Even your most die-hard fans consider this album a slip in quality. Yet you were using pretty much the same compositional method as always. What happened? Well, for one thing, the xylophone solo alone was a whopping 20 minutes long.

What I'm talking about here is album flow, macrodynamics, if you will. You have the opener, the closer, the stuff at the middle, and all that has to make sense together. Once the albums become longer, this becomes a more evident concern. You must be able to maintain a balance between variety and consistency, creativity and identity of the individual songs. And that's why Welcome To Amnesia Street should have been a shorter album: it has great tracks, but they're all way too alike. Wait, that's not really true. What happens is that we have a pretty acceptable amount of variety, but it's spread among an amount of time that would require about half a metric fuckload of variety, at least. Or maybe some sense of progression, another thing this release really lacks.

Anyway, I suppose it's as good a time as any to be late to explain the overall sound of what I'm reviewing, so here we go. Based on my ludicrously limited knowledge of electronic music, we have here an interesting and unusual take on ambient electronic with slightly atonal and mathematical characteristics. The production is extremely dry, not usual for something of this kind. And personally, I like it. Because after that initial horribly-synthetic-sound shock, it works in the same way that a health freak's perception lets them notice and memorize every single freckle on their body, as well as the date each one popped up. All in all, Mooseifer's work here is comparable to a creative expansion of what Trent Reznor would do in his slower stuff, minus vocals, plus a dose of hipster cred closing in on LD50.

Back to the flow thing from earlier. We begin and end the listen on a disappointing note (this disappointment implying the existence of potential for greatness), and spend the rest of the time randomly leaping from mental state to mental state, with song quality ranging anywhere from “incredible” to “someone describing their stamp collection”. If albums were people, this would be a totally normal person, and that is not a good thing for an album to be. It has a certain personality, certain characteristics, certain details: some boring, some fascinating, and it doesn't know why it got them and what to do with them. So the listener ends up being given separate but consistent ideas to pick the best from. I'm not saying that Welcome To Amnesia Street should have been released as 16 separate singles, just that it's 16 singles under one name.

Also, some of the tracks sound like different takes on the same principle, especially on the latter half. I'd rather there were only one track per principle. Yet idea consistency is more of a tool than a burden, meaning that the actual problem is rooted in composition method. It never devolves into “add layer to main beat (*infinity)”, Mooseifer being careful to add some tasty changes, transitions, interludes and the occasional chorus to spice things up, but it doesn't negate the possibility of that devolution happening. Atmosphere is the main focus here, an almost droningly constant atmosphere. Meaning that song structure is rarely used for anything beyond novel variety. Dynamics are mostly absent. One song even shows how horribly this technique can backfire, isn't that right, “Joined Together (By The Eyes)”?

So yeah, judging by the tone of my review, I suppose you've deduced that I didn't really develop much of an emotional bond with this release. That is totally true, but it doesn't mean I don't like it. For one thing, there is something inherently human about the endeavor that seems to lack in better produced music. For another thing, the layers and sounds chosen and atmospheres are unlike anything I've ever heard. Maybe that's because I haven't heard all that much anyway, but my impression is that, through a creative use of presets, Mooseifer managed to somehow extend beyond the horrid production and make that his thing. Not to mention that the rationed use of dynamics works miracles in some songs. Mostly “Clam City Evacuation”, though. Finally, it's the sense of discovery that you get from this sort of thing: obscure music that oozes of and revels in its own obscurity. Music that makes you realize both how many talented people there are out there and how much of an important role the listener has after all. As for Philosophorgy, I like their name and backstory you imagined a while ago. I think I'll start using your hypothetical prog band more often. Oh, and your 70 minute song sucked, by the way.

Standout tracks:

Mind Eggs
Clam City Evacuation
Calmer Gardai
Summoning The Whatsamajig
Mega Witch 3
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