•
Rating:
The Narrowed, here, are a nice Las Vegas-based emo band.
The drummer is Christopher Sanchez, a cute Hispanic guy, tattooed and trendy, who in 2014 provided us via Bandcamp-name-your-price - semper laudatus sit - with a nice statutory prospectus of the imposing underground mass of drone soundscapes created on stretched, tampered, overdubbed, and hydrated field recordings. Or directly designed on the regular and mathematical wave of digital noise, or of sustain and GMO feedback. Even if GMO as an adjective would be incorrect, because we're talking about vibrations mostly immaterial - in the case of noise, they are immaterial even on the meaning level, as they do not have identifiable referents with real objects - and certainly inorganic. Unless one is a Democritean visionary, or possesses sight into the fourth dimension, and then I wouldn't know.
The most astute and the noisenauts hardened will have indeed noticed the considerable amount of sound material available online, within this whole realm. To an easy availability and wide diffusion certainly corresponds a homogeneity of materials, poorly differentiated in outcomes and intent (moreover, almost never pretentious). It is therefore reasonable to ask why write about ghostofthegardenicity and not another random one; and why not write a comprehensive panorama to sell and profit from the money. Firstly, because a choice must be made: always, in life. Then, because the homogeneity mentioned is more apparent than real. And partly because the writer decides, and the others must remain silent.
But mainly because the lower-case project ghostofthegardencity, in five movements produced between March and December, well represents a scene made of anti-structural approach to light music, resuming some of its superficial instances - album, cover, title, track, sharing practices - and at the same time transfiguring the contents into an ethereal magma or music of concrete craftsmanship. Music certainly child of no wave and the most daring and theoretical experimentalism, but only - and not always - on the surface level: because, despite postulates, poetics, and expressionist artifacts, here we're talking about a fetishistic impressionism marked by a patina of white noise that wraps humans since their womb days. Perhaps a form of autism due to an accentuated auditory attitude of a pre-pre-oedipal phase. Perhaps unresolved conflicts or traumatic births: if it's true that the writer, at a very young age, considered making a noose from his umbilical cord, maybe it is. Perhaps who knows.
This is the last of the five titles of ghostofthegardencity, released on Christmas Eve. If the field recording element is present, it is so diluted as to become an indecipherable and ghostly presence, almost animal, in the sustained and distorted feedback flow of Through the Sands of Time - title of Persian (Prince of) features - which uses materials potentially percussive and of casual placement, as in a Homotopy to Marie where the fullness prevails over the voids. Behind the Curtain of Helios, on the other hand, starts from a guitar and a bass, easily identifiable but very distant with a clear post-rock derivation, only to implode between the long waves, rather than explode like in happy moments of GY!BE or remain unexploded as in unhappy moments of all various imitators.
Warm and welcoming, but not sensual: like a mother.
That is, like one's own mother; not like just any mother, who can easily be sensual and everything.
Loading comments slowly
