features Loy Fankbonner on drums, Margarida Garcia on electric double
bass, Kevin Failure on guitar and piano, and Mattin on vocals.
Recorded by Dougie
Bowne & Ivan Julian at NYHED, NYC 27 February 2009.
Anti-copyright
A
1 Reveal the Structure: Exquisite Corpse│
2 Diaries in Exile
3 Against The Reprodcution of Stereotypes
4 Pretentious
5 The Most Abject Form of Authorship
B
6 New World Order
7 Instability
8 Recovery.gov
9 Abstraction Will Bring You Death
10 Kill It While You Can
"If you've been following his work (and even if you haven't, you big
bugbear) you know that Mattin brings a conceptual musician's ear to his
rock 'n' roll but he keeps it out of the museum and on the 'streetz,' 'cos
that's where the riots went down, and this places him at a helluva impasse:
the European dialectical impulse has no choice but to hurtle head-on into a
game of chicken with the American-historical rock narrative (not the name
of a band, though it should be) or to get in bed with it and allow their
legs to intertwine in an awkward genital embrace. So it was that in the
winter of '08, the bellicose Basque recruited globetrotting bass pervert
Margarida Garcia, Kevin Failure of Pink Reason (guitar and piano), and
erstwhile Chinese Restaurant 'Lucky' Lloyd Frackkbonner (drums) for an
exquisitely corpsical seance conducted on Manhattan's Lower East Side,
where Lautreamont shakes hands with the Language Poets and hunkers down for
a burger and a smoke with Ivan Julian and Dougie Bowne (engineers and
Vietnam vets both). Together they perform an ontological autopsy on the
body of rock & roll form, then hogtie the improviser's process with a rope
made of crisis (remember the bailout?) -- the Surrealist parlor game
subjected here to crushing technology and a stopwatch plus liquor and
god-knows-what else. The Rules: ten songs, each exactly three minutes in
duration, recorded in strict ass-backwards fashion: first the vocals, then
Kevin's guitars, etc., then Margarida's bowed and throbbing bass, then the
drums. No second takes. No two musicians were allowed in the studio at
the same time and none of them could hear a playback so their only guide --
their score, if you will -- was Mattin's lyrics, which themselves are a
living corpse that slices itself open to display its guts, which look like
these ten songs or a mangled womb. So we hear it for the first time and
guess what? It sounds like a Top-40 station playing nothing but side B of
No New York. No shit. Every song is a hit."
20122011Punk rockers! Every month, a
couple weeks after the magazine comes out, we post our reviewers’
monthly top tens from the latest issue of Maximum Rocknroll. This one’s from MRR #344, the January 2012 issue. Savor the goodness…
Mitch Cardwell
LITTLE QUEENIE-live
DWARF-Gotta Get Louder/I Won’t Be Back-45
PERIPHERIQUE EST-both EPs
SHARP BALLOONS-Evening News-EP
DEAD FARMERS-Out the Door/Never Enough-45
SHIT DOGS-Present the History of Cheese-2xEP
SEX CULT-Errand Boy-EP
VIDEO-Leather Leather-LP
MATTIN-Exquisite Corpse-LP
SEX CHURCH-Growing Over-LP
It’s hard to think of many artists that have made radical Marxist
concerns and over-arching concepts seem even vaguely interesting in a
rock-as-rock context, there’s uh.... well, there’s Mattin. Billy Bao
were, for a while, the most amazing marriage of sociopathic rage and
sociopathtic theory, perfectly marrying Mattin’s love for Lou with his
love for Looting. And now comes this, a new solo album where he is
joined by the always-amazing Margarida Garcia on electric double bass,
Kevin Failure of Pink Reason on electric guitar and piano and Loy
Fankbonner on drums, while he steps in on vocals and lyrics. Inspired by
the Surrealist concept of The Exquisite Corpse, drawings or words
written on folded paper where you must add the next contribution without
any knowledge of what the other person has put down, Mattin handed out a
set of lyrics and asked each player to lay down their part without any
other guidance or any other instruments to play to. Each part was then
mixed in as-is with Mattin’s vocals over the top. No two musicians were
allowed in the studio at the same time, everything was one take and no
playbacks were allowed. The results are jaw-dropping. The staggered
rhythms and sudden speed-ups and stops/starts give the music an
unpredictable/feral energy with Failure’s guitar sounding like something
out of the first couple of Crass albums while Fankbonner moves from
scattershot punctuation to sudden last-minute accelerations accompanied
by Garcia’s cranking bass. Mattin’s vocals are amazing, possessed of the
kind of hectoring/hysterical energy of The Afflicted Man or even Lydon
circa Metal Box while the music feels like a spiritual cousin of the
whole Oi/d-beat/post-punk UK aggro scene, albeit re-thunk by Japanese
gods of thunder Kousokuya and with Tori Kudo on the mix. At other
points, when the piano comes in, it could almost be Yoko Ono’s Fly only
here peace gets no chances, beds are on fire and the time is right for
fighting in the street. The absolute success of Mattin’s gamble only
goes to underline how important chance, freedom and aleatoric strategies
are to keeping rock music alive as any kind of expressive cultural
force, something that has been internalised and re-stated again and
again throughout its’ history, whether through punk’s deliberate refusal
of ‘technique’, psychedelia’s inheritance of free improvisation as the
keys to the kingdom or noise’s refusal of dialogue altogether. Left to
chance, beyond any notions of exchange, beyond organisation, beyond
entertainment or simple ‘communication’, beyond bullshit notions of
‘creating a space where dialogue can take place’ (perhaps the most
tiresome apologia of contemporary art praxis) the best rock exists in a
zone that’s unanswerable to technique, unassailable and incapable of
assimilation and this new project from Mattin, well, it’s just like alla
the best rock/roll, impossible to reproduce, offensive to any fixed
artistic sensibility and drawing power by insisting on excess. Totally
fantastic and highly recommended!
detourn yourself! this shrieks. debord’s
like a fucking spectre hanging over me just now. letterists got a fist
in my ass working me like a ventriloquists dummy. yup mattins’ back.
reductionally, indulging the destructive/restrictive rockist impulses of
billy bao with a spewy fervour not seen since… okay not the last billy
bao record (urban disease) but certainly may08.
see, unpredictability’s what i dig about
mattin. urban disease was so beautifully unlike a billy bao record,
defined by silence, lacking words. exquisite corpse is baoist in all but
name. unredeconstructed rawk, spittle-flecked and foam-mouthed. lyrics
that read like marxist/situationist pamphlets. and all wrapped up in a
muss of violent concept.
this is a record as much about rock music as capitalism. putting the exquisite corpse
as game aside, taking the words at face value, we’re looking at the
bloated airbrushed near-zombie nonfuckerry of rock and roll as an
artistic force, we’re looking at the (kinda) free market as ouroboros,
devouring it’s own dead flesh. both theories impotent, like leatherface
wildly swinging that huge dick chainsaw at thin air; the realisation a
way of life’s coming to a(n) (un)climactic end. which makes this record
such a goddam joy. fulla wild messy pep. an epinephrine shot to yr
head/heart/gut/cock/cunt/feet. all the corporeal zones music should kick you in.
mattin and his savage chinese whisperers
hack unsighted at the cadaver of rock and roll, blind men performing an
autopsy on pre-post-bust-capitalism. a ten track three year old
prescience of the carry-on-as-normal weekend at bernies school of
economics. none of this fichtean dialectic and oppositional
psychopathology would matter a tinker’s cuss if it wasn’t glued to to
such (im)perfect, uncut (in every sense of the word) bash and clatter,
if it was done with a fair bit of dry, dry panache. can’t help but like a
fella who follows up the line ‘revolution through language’ with ‘i
never wrote slogan songs’…
it started, in proper contrarian style,
with mattin’s lyrics and voice. followed by kevin failure’s guitar and
piano. then margarida garcia’s bass. and finally loy fankbonner’s drums.
all recorded independently, without hearing the other’s part, with
nothing to go on but words. the rules: one take, three minutes per
track. no way back, said the man himself. fuck technique, fuck metre,
fuck progression, fuck structure. it is what it is in this moment.
and the results? a wild, vicious thrash.
songs, forever staggering at the edge, teetering on the cusp,
threatening to fall spectacularly apart but somehow never succumbing to
the ugly pull of gravity. vox that veer from croon to snarl to jabber.
beats like hardcore that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself then
suddenly remembers. fella on guitar pulling brutish gobs of skree and
punctuation marks of semi-refined piano klang from the aether. buckshots
of bass, aiming at nothing and hitting everything.
prefix avant-something / post-whatever
all you like. it’s against itself. and at it’s core it does what rock
music should do, but rarely does: refuse/resist.
El
último trabajo de Mattin es un ejercicio de creación colectivo. De
hecho, el título del disco hace referencia al Cadáver
Exquisito técnica utilizada por los
surrealistas para la creación de un texto o imagen colectiva, con un
peculiaridad, que los participantes sólo pueden ver la aportación
del autor que participó anteriormente a él. Esto es, el
participante no podrá ver la aportación del resto hasta el final de
la obra. El resultado es un collage irracional. Los dadaístas fueron
los precursores de este tipo de acciones, entre otros, Raoul Hausmann
inventor del fotomontaje. Más tarde, el escritor beat
William S. Burroughs y el artista Bryon Gysin lo trasladaron al
ámbito del sonido y lo bautizaron como cut-up.
O lo que es lo mismo, el corta/pega del que tanto se abusa y
subestima hoy en día. Con el objetivo de evitar el proceso clásico
de grabación de un disco rock, el terrorista sonoro vizcaíno
entregó las letras de estos temas a tres músicos dos días antes de
entrar en el estudio. Así, esas letras (puñaladas afiladas
dirigidas al sistema capitalista actual) fueron la única guía que
tuvieron los músicos Loy Fankbonner (bateria), Margarida Garcia
bajo), y Kevin Failure (guitarra y piano, Pink Reason), ya que
grabaron todas las canciones sin verse ni escucharse entre sí, en la
primera toma. Mattin ya me advirtió vía mail que era un disco
difícil, pero el resultado me ha dejado perplejo. Es un trabajo
espontaneo, intuitivo y primitivo, y bastante más audible de lo que
me esperaba. Aquí no hay rastro del noise-rock de Billy Bao, -el
otro proyecto de Mattin-, ni tampoco se detectan rastros de los riffs
repetitivos e interminables de sus queridos Brainbombs; aquí lo que
impera es la improvisación, los ambientes de calma áspera, los
arrebatos impetuosos y la desesperada voz de Mattin. Es un
experimento espontáneo realizado con osadía infantil. La clave es
lo que surge en el momento, eternizar el instante. Prueba de ellos
The Most Abject Form Of Authorship un
corte arrebatador, donde texturas ruidosas se unen con un piano roto,
entre gritos desgarradores. Grabado en Nueva York en 2009, se han
editado 450 LPs. Este fiambre está muy vivo.
Nuevo
material del vasco Mattin es siempre bien recibido por un servidor, un
verdadero artista revolucionario, que acostumbra cambiarnos las reglas
del juego con cada una de sus grabaciones, ya sea en plan live improv, en el noise, como Billy Bao, en colaboración con otros y bajo su propio nombre, un gusto tener a Mattin de vuelta.
Exquisite Corpse
es como se ha denominado a una metodología de trabajo (principalmente
en creación literaria ideada por los surrelistas), consistente en el
trabajo de conjunto de varios participantes, en el cual uno inicia con
una propuesta y en orden variado cada uno va partiendo de dónde termina
el participante anterior (sin conocer que escribió este), dándole giros
inesperados al trabajo y creando nuevas ideas que en la suma traen un
trabajo interesante en una suma de todos los esfuerzos, a veces difícil,
complejo y que exige bastante de cada participante, a veces sujeto a
tiempo, a veces sujeto a la capacidad de improvisar de cada uno de los
participantes, no es de sorprendernos porque Mattin eligió este concepto
para su nueva grabación.
Querer
entender Exquisite Corpse únicamente a través de la música, sin todo el
concepto global, sería como tratar de explicarse lo “monumental” del
Biophilia de Bjork sin todo el rollo de los apps y la creación en Ipad
que redondeaban el concepto de ese disco, y es que es necesario saber
el proceso creativo al que Mattin sometió a los participantes para la
creación de esta interesante obra.
Para esta grabación Mattin reclutó a importantes participantes del underground
mundial, la portuguesa Margarida García en el bajo, Kevin Failure del
grupo Pink Reason en la guitarra y el piano, el baterista Lloyd
Frackkbonner y el mismo Mattin en la voz, y bien ahora que conocemos a
las fichas de este juego, podemos proceder a saber como se gestó, la
idea es una agresión directa y buena sacudida a los paradigmas de las
grabaciones modernas, dónde por lo general se graban las baterías, los
bajos, las guitarras y las voces en ese orden, en primer lugar, el
siempre listo Mattin invierte los factores, primera sacudida, la única
base para la grabación son las letras de Mattin, las cuales son
entregadas a cada uno de los participantes en papel, cada uno de ellos
tiene exactamente tres minutos para improvisar en base a esas letras
(segunda sacudida), una sola toma, sin re grabaciones (tercera
sacudida), en base a eso Mattin se encargó de mezclar las grabaciones
individuales agregándoles su voz de manera digital, el resultado, en
primer lugar, sorprendentemente suena coherente, es decir, no suena a
partes separadas, nos remite a esas grabaciones que desconocían tiempos y
métricas formales que nos recetaban el buen Capitan Beefheart, dónde a
pesar de lo disparatado de cada uno de los inputs, el todo final lograba sonar de una pieza, como una hidra de mil cabezas.
Mattin tiene éxito con su cometido, mucho del sonido remite a la no wave,
con Mattin agregando las torturadas vocales con que nos ha
acostumbrado, como si John Lydon, ese de los PIL hubiera sufrido una
lobotomía (vaya cosa, como si Lydon la necesitase), con una Margarida
brutal como siempre, omnipresente usando su bajo como un poderoso
instrumento de percusión en lugar de ajustarse tímidamente a un ritmo,
golpeándolo, raspándolo, exprimiéndole hasta la última gota de sonido,
con un Kevin Failure que flota libremente con sus desgarradoras
aportaciones en la guitarra que recuerdan en mucho a Arto Lindsay en su
época con los DNA, con un total desprecio por las rítmicas
tradicionales, y cuyas incursiones de piano resultan un respiro ante tan
frenético paso de los participantes y bueno, no podemos hacer menos la
aportación de Frackkbonner, quien en parte improvisa o colorea y en
parte mantiene ritmos de rock sólidos, una obra que a pesar de su muy
arriesgado concepto, termina sonado de una sola pieza, Mattin se apunta
otro acierto en dónde concepto y música van de la mano formando un todo
como una obra mayúscula, sirviendo de admirable ejemplo para los demás
de cómo la música o el sonido si prefieren llamarle así, puede ser
llevada a otros niveles, re escribiendo por completo las reglas del
juego.
It can be argued that Mattin’s latest Exquisite Corpse is one of the most unlistenable records ever.
Atonal anti-melodies, jarring start-stop dynamics, and extreme
off-the-cuff vocal improvisations all make for an impossible to follow
trek of frenetic and anxious post-punk noise. However, the group’s
sense of feral chaos lends excitement that’s rough around every edge
imaginable. Featuring a new string of players, including Kevin Failure
of Pink Reason, the busted songs here haunt and bruise with reckless
abandon and suicidal self abuse. The pieces here bear a striking
resemblance to Swell Maps at their sharpest and most raucous.
Overblown sketches of potentially great, world-ending songs are
discovered seemingly while they were recorded as though a
self-proclaimed genius working under an impossible deadline.
As it turns out, the record’s concept could have easily undermined
the entire project. Mattin (the artist) explains that the lyrics were
given to the players a couple of days before recording, and none of the
players recorded (or even saw each other) at the same time.
Everything was layered on top of the previous session until the album
was done.
At times, the songs resemble Dead Kennedys stoned out of their minds, lost basement demos for Jane from Occupied Europe, or a wasted cover band doing their best to reinterpret No New York rather than the Misfits for the umpteenth time. In the end, it’s a consuming squall of surrealism and noise.
Just so you know, I saw a review online that called this “one of the
most unlistenable records ever.” Here’s the deal: Anarchist punk
improvising artist noisemaker Mattin (Basque by birth but now a
troublemaking citizen of the whole damned world) wrote a batch of
extreme, socially conscious, the-world-is-fucked lyrics and recorded
them in his jabbering nonsense of a voice. Then he enlisted three
musicians (guitar/piano, bass, and drums) to come up with backing music,
giving them exactly three minutes per song to do whatever they wanted
and only one take to get each song right. And oh yeah, I almost forgot
to mention that none of the players ever heard the others or even the
vocals; they had the lyrics for inspiration and that’s all. They had no
idea what the vocals sounded like or how the other musicians were
dealing with key, tempo, or style. Not that it mattered. Mattin piled
the parts one on top of another and called it a mix. Boom, done. It
sounds pretty much like you would expect it to, all loud chaos and
sharp-edged randomness, making absolutely no sense. I enjoyed this
record in spite of it being completely unlistenable.
Reviewed by Max Level on
January 31, 2012 at 8:02 pm
Viejo conocido de la escena, ex Inte Domine y en La Grieta, Mattin sigue ideando concepciones abstractas sobre
la música donde la improvisación es la razón de ser, dejando que el
momento sea el que influya en el músico y no al revés. Diez temas
grabados siguiendo la doctrina del holismo, el cuarteto liderado por el
getxotarra (ahora en Suecia ) apuesta or el ruidismo bajo un enfoque
algo más rock de lo que acostumbra y epatando, como debe ser. Alvaro
Fierro
============
VITAL WEEKLY
============
number 800
---------------------
week 40
---------------------
To say that I like everything Mattin does is not right: I don't. If
there is one aspect however I do like about his work is that he always
surprises me. He has on put on some harsh noise, some utter conceptual
music albums (also on his own label) and has experimented with free form
rock and noise. Here he has a new 'band', Exquisite Corpse, the way of
creating things where one doesn't create hears what the others did, so
on this record Mattin sings and wrote the lyrics and recorded those
first. Then he added the electric double bass of Margarida Garcia, then
guitar and piano of Kevin Failure, and at last the drums of Loy
Fankbonner. All of them played for ten times three minutes - the average
rock length (Mattin says, but he is confused with a pop song), without
hearing what the others did. Mattin overlayed all of this music without
too much mixing and there you: exquisite corpse. Its Mattin in his full
free rock and noise mode here, and I have to admit its not always my
kind of music but the whole thing sounds quite energetic and crazy. Probably the kind
of free stuff that you would probably also get if you would have all
these people playing together at the same time, but such things could
not spoil the fun I had with this record. Mattin has his political cap
on when writing these lyrics, which are luckily printed on the cover -
otherwise I couldn't have known. I have no idea what exactly is being
questioned here, maybe the nature of rock records? Punk? Or simply an
interesting way of creating mayhem - if its just the latter, then Mattin
succeeded very well: pleasantly disturbed...Excellent Confussion! FdW
Очень оригинальные испанский музыкант, работающий на стыке нойз-рока и
того, что зовётся spoken word - этот альбом записан в стилистике,
близкой последнему эксперименту Лу Рида с Металликой, только здесь
вместо металлических риффов - нойзовые. Вообще же, дискография у Mattin
вполне приличная (если считать ещё всякие коллаборации с группами, где
он успел поиграть в основном как гитарист), этот альбом - первый,
который я него пока послушал (хотя с Billy Bao, где он числится
участником, раньше немного ознакомился), интересно будет узнать, как
эволюционировала его творческая манера. В отличие от того же Лу Рида,
пижонства у Маттина нет как нет, а есть юродивая страсть, если не
кликушество, поэтому поначалу его музыка может вызвать отторжение, хотя
для тех, кто любит, например, The Hospitals, тут всё в порядке вещей.
Bleeding every which way, Mattin & a few friends pick up a set of
rock instruments & make a record of all overdubs without hearing
what any of the other band members are doing. They only have Mattin's
lyrics to go on, and of course those are quite cutting. Basically
another Billy Bao record, but those sick zippers of guitar, random drum
bashes & blubbering vocals arrive upon your ear with considerable
savagery.
Recorded in a style similar to the paper play game the record is named
after, with the musicians making music with nothing to guide them but
Mattin¹s lyrics. The first BILLY BAO records I heard really affected me, the
relentlessness and disgust were total, like the best HC 45s, but I think the
conceptuality of his records sometimes gets in the way of my enjoyment of
them. But then, what music isn¹t conceptual, everything is
constructed/intentionalŠ Exquisite Corpse was put together in sections and
it sounds that way, it¹s not like paint dripping down a wall boredom by any
stretch, but the parts that aren¹t compelling are made more apparent by the
difference between them and the songs that do work. The guitar sound is
particularly cool, having a sort of treble/nasal tone that brings to mind
the more fucked up end of anarcho punk, NICK BLINKO or even ³Poptones.² All
of the musicians are clearly great at what they do, there are people from
various noise combos, the kind of people who could probably make a living
playing session drums or whatever along with sometime MRR columnist Kevin of
PINK REASON. What really kills it for me are the vocals, they are emotional
in a way that seems like a put on, like listening to a whiny manarchist
hitting on one of your friends. It is not that intriguing. It seems like a
sound that¹s simultaneously calling for the end of yet is also celebrating
rock¹n¹roll would be more compelling than this, like if they mean it about
abandoning the galleries for the streets how come you can¹t feel the
concrete? I guess this was supposed to come out three years ago, but the US
record label dropped the ball, so now it¹s limited to 150 on a Euro label.
Act fast! (LG)
Just Outside (Brian Olewnick, New Jersey, November 2011)
The
idea is simple enough: four parts of each of ten songs recorded
independently, with only the lyrics serving as "graphic score" of a
kind, limiting the length to standard pop's three minutes, layering the
results without discrimination. MIMEO's "Sight" was a far deeper
exploration along tangential lines, including as it did the advice to
think in terms of the communality of the ensemble despite being
geographically isolated. Perhaps the same idea was at play here or the
members thought of it themselves. I also found myself recalling Gavin
Bryars' wonderful "1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4" on that mid-70s Obscure disc,
wherein the group member recorded simultaneously but outside the range
of hearing each other, beginning a written piece together (in this case a
loungy jazz number) but gradually, inevitably, drifting apart.
In
any event, we *are* presented with a commodity here, another in a long
string of seemingly contradictory product emanating from Mattin who
might just as likely sit and stare at his performing partner for the
duration of the set, recording what transpires, playing it back
immediately, or not show up, or interrogate the audience. Not sure if
this is the "last" item which presents a fairly traditional musical
approach (in ultimate outcome, if not in means of production). If I
attempt to describe what it sounds like...oh, a bit of Boredoms, maybe
some DNA, any number of groups straddling the noise/rock divide. At
times, rather amusingly, it brings back memories of Last Exit or Arcana.
It's perfectly listenable, very loose, Failure's guitar chiming,
Fankbonner's drums supple and varied and, probably (not surprisingly)
Garcia's bass, rough-hewn and uncompromising, supplying the most
material of lasting interest. Mattin's vocals are suitably disjointed
and glossolaliac.
I’m not sure how many reviews I will
manage to write this week. last year if I remember correctly I stopped
even trying until Boxing Day, such is the impact the silly season has on
my day job, and subsequently on me. I am exhausted tonight but do not
have to be up early tomorrow, so will write a review this evening, but I
can’t be sure that I will be able to manage to do so many more time
this week. Tonight then I have been listening to a vinyl album I first
played two or three weeks back, but found so interminably unlistenable
that I have only just pulled it out again tonight. Its not really an
album that particularly demands a lot of careful listening anyway.
The album is a new conceptual work from Mattin named Exquisite Corpse.
The music was created using a method similar to the traditional game
of the same name in which a group of people individually draw different
parts of a drawing, often a person, without being able to see the
contributions of the other members of the group. For this album, which
is jointly released on Mattin’s w.m.o/r label and the Azul Discografica
label, Mattin wrote the lyrics to ten songs, which he then sent out to
the three other members of the group he has formed for this project- Loy
Fankbonner, (drums) Margarida Garcia (electric bass) and Kevin Failure
(guitar and piano). Each group member only received the lyrics a couple
of days in advance of recording their individual parts, which they did
separately and without any contact with one another. All they were sent
were the lyrics, and the instruction that each of the ten songs should
only last three minutes. The three instrumental parts were then
superimposed by Mattin without any editing later, with an additional
fourth track, his vocals, added on top, again recorded without having
heard anything his collaborators had produced. The lyrics then were
meant to provide some kind of, (in Mattin’s words) graphic score for the
project, the only element the musicians could use to try and guess at
how the music might sound.
This kind of exquisite corpse game is not unusual in improvised or experimental music. recently of course, MIMEO’s sight
album was created in a vaguely similar way, and many other examples can
be found in recent history. Perhaps the one thing that sets this album
off from those other works might be its attempt to create a somewhat
mainstream form of music with rhythm, melody and sung words rather than
anything as abstract as the sight project produced. the end
result then, as perhaps we might expect, is a somewhat disjointed
garage-punk styled mess of a record, bass and drums never connecting,
grainy insistent guitars thrashing about, and Mattin’s half spoken, half
shouted, never really sung lyrics scrawled all over the top. There are
some moments that almost work, some happy accidents where two musicians
might change course suddenly int he same place, or parts where all of
the group might decide to play quieter, or more slowly, and one might
wonder how much of this is the result of the musicians interpreting the
lyrics in similar ways and how much might just be happy accident. Any
enjoyment taken from the album then came for me from the curiosity of
what such a project might throw up. On the whole though, it sounds like
rough outtakes from a dodgy mid-Eighties Velvet Underground tribute
band’s practice sessions. Not a pretty thought then, though I am also
quite aware of how that description could actually please Mattin!
My problem with this project is not so much that it produced
something that isn’t so inspiring to listen to, but rather that its a
bit of an old, boring idea. In his liner notes Mattin mentions that
because the musicians were only allowed one take to respond to lyrics
they had not had much time with, they came close to the spirit of
improvisation. I’m not so sure that this was really the case, given that
they each have tried at least to make sounds that might work together
to form a set of rock songs, albeit of the somewhat obscure avant-punk
variety. Beyond the intriguing way that the different musicians
interpreted each track, and beyond the novelty element that any project
of this type might engender though, this seems a bit of a lightweight,
throwaway project for Mattin. It comes across as part interesting, if
unoriginal concept, and part homage to the rock and roll studio
experience. Unlike other Mattin works of recent years though, its
ugliness as a piece of music is not really compensated for by an
interesting conceptual idea. Nothing here leaves me thinking long after
the needle has come to rest in the last groove, and the end result is
somewhat predictable. It all ends up being a bit of a throwaway project
then, of the kind I really don’t expect from Mattin. No big criticisms,
just not something that left much of an impression.
Prolific Basque
provocateur Mattin has mde a micro-career out of valuing ideas more
than musicality, and there's often much to be said for this sort of
upturning of the apple cart of trad sonic concerns. His latest
anti-album album, Exquisite Corpse,
is another predictably unpredictable sandbox experiment.
Anyone
who's ever taken a long childhood road trip with siblings has
probably played Exquisite Corpse, where you take turns completing
portions of a drawing without being allowed to see the previous
section. At the end, the paper is unfolded and the clash of arbitrary
shapes and styles provides a moment of amusement for the
participants. When applied to the audio realm – with each musicians
recording their part in isolation, excluded from being in the same
recording space with the others – the results are similarly chaotic
and nonsensical.
Mattin's
vocals ramble and rant in their own odd vacuum. The guitar (played by
Kevin Failure aka Pink Reason) tries to pre-empt Mattin's polemical
lyrics with distortion-shredded No Wave atonality. Where it
occasionally succeeds, the rhythm section suffers as consequence. The
bass stagnates in sustained, low-end drones, which only further
muddles up the already deconstructed group logic. The drummer fares
only slightly better, weaving back and forth between crashing
art-punk bursts and 'let's wait and see what Mattin does next' cymbal
skitter.
Given
how restrictive the premise was,
it seemed unnecessary (if not masochistic) to further complicated the
proceedings by allowing each musicians only a single take per song,
and capping the duration of each track at exactly three minutes. One
assumes Mattin finds a perverse pleasure or freedom in the
bondage-like restrictions of such a set-up, and while art in all its
forms has often benefited from healthy does of perversion to keep it
alive, Exquisite
Corpse
feels as closed off and contrived in its own way as a tedious
blog-reared indie rock group.
There
is a Dostoevsky quote that reads, “ Man grows used to everything,
the scoundrel.” After years of excessive overuse, Mattin's
permanent middle finger has come to feel as rote and flat as a lazy
peace sign thrown up by a tired hippy. Britt Brown
