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LP
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MR 386LP
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Songbook #7 is the new volume of Mattin's Songbook series, one of the most interesting works in the current experimental, improv and noise field. Songbook #7 features Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Lucio Capece, Moor Mother, Cathleen Schuster, and Marcel Dickhage and was recorded in November 2017 at Digging the Global South Festival in Cologne, while Europe was (still is) slowly going down. Layers of avant-garde tradition culminate into a set of songs that go beyond themselves. In times of increasing desperation emerges a strange record: a disintegrated manifesto exploring the truth of disagreement. Exactly 100 years ago Europe was really crumbling. However, there was a proposition for a collective future in process. This songbook takes two moments as historical inspiration in order to rethink the present: The first seven months of 1917 in revolutionary Russia, and the figure of Germaine Berton (pictured on the cover), the anarchist who in 1923 was accused of murdering Marius Plateau, director of the far-right organization French Action League. In a time of war and fascism, those were two very different answers: a collective attempt at social transformation and a desperate lonely gesture. Neither response really managed to succeed to overthrow capitalism but they had a motivation and a clear way to act, something that seems to be lacking right now. If previous songbooks dealt with the tension between improvisation and song structure, between an emphasis on the production of the moment and having a conceptual framework, here the tension is produced by conflating the present with the past, and in doing so the tension between communism and anarchism is also explored. Songbook #7 digs into some of the most important issues today: dissolution and disappointment of the social fabric, the rise of fascism, lack of coherence in a collective vision for the future, and the shortcomings of democracy in a capitalist system. If one wants some musical references you can imagine one of those collaborations between Red Crayola and Art And Language if it was produced by Roberta Settels, or if Rabit was asked to do a remix of Nono's La Fabbrica Illuminata, taking into account the Altoforno di Cornigliano factory's demolition in 2005. This great line-up tries to think the present through the lenses of radical historical moments and in doing so it achieves music both arcane and futuristic.
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MR 371LP
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"Butthole Surfers meets Run The Jewels" --Dean Roberts. Yes, there is rock, but it's so deformed that not even no wave could help you make sense out of it. Imagine if a bunch of viruses filled with fake news and contemporary nastiness would go straight to the core of no wave, punk, and rock's integrity: authenticity. Not to say that the Butthole Surfers were the most authentic band in the world or that this record matches the production of El-P, but instead here you have some of the most exciting musicians in Berlin coming together for the first time, interpreting some lyrics from Mattin, dealing with our fucked up times and the search for overcoming them. To say that there is no authenticity is not to fall into the postmodern relativism that has been a debilitating force in the struggle against the new wave of neo fascism. In fact, the latter also claim their own authenticity: race realism. Not surprisingly, authenticity was also at the core of Heidegger, which somehow connects National Socialism and its French deconstructionist critics. Even if this record for some might sound like deconstructed rock through electronic noise and improv, it is also doing something else, like building a Frankenstein monster in the form of a rock-as-zombie-avatar: as if Lou Reed would haunt us from the other side, connecting the motherboards of our devices to our brains, giving us all electroshocks for not being able to stop this fascism-as-the-new-punk regime, while he shouts at us: they got the traction on danger and you need to take it back! Features Farahnaz Hatam, Pan Daijing, Colin Hacklander, Werner Dafeldecker, and Dean Roberts.
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