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LP
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PP 058LP
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Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut "Stay" lays the way for exploration of sound and song as simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent and subsequent "Janet's Song" weaves these elements alongside the sound pebbles entering a water. This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation. "Tonight" flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. "Egyptian Wedding" sounds like Still House Plants if they operated off the depths of a rotating well. "Forming a round" is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do. There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around.
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LP
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PP 048LP
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"... The city of Mankato, Minnesota has been the steady gathering point for the band since its beginnings. Mankato had always provided an ominous backdrop: built on stolen Dakota land, the city was the site of the largest mass execution in US history, when 38 Dakota prisoners were hanged on in 1862 in a straightforward act of genocide. But in their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture -- only as ghosts or unliving effigies. A Year Closer tells you in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn't working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in 'Dark Skies'. We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in 'We Had Time' or the romantic lament of 'When I Drink.' In 'Work Last Monday,' all of life passes with cold automatism in an 'office apartment,' as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of 'Over the Hill' isn't apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a 'man,' but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. 'Angel of Mercy' tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world. But these are just the moments when A Year Closer speaks in words clear and audible enough to be understood. The giddy, agitated voice of 'The Price' speaks only to itself in a private language, hidden away in a tin can somewhere. Musically, A Year Closer is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide..." --Paul Buchholz Includes A4 insert; edition of 283.
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