Minimal Man
Safari

The gift of conciseness. This Safari, yes indeed, is a ritual, a song of Maldoror disguised as post-punk wielding a knife, but with a broken blade, laughing as it brushes your throat. A blade that will reappear. Only He smiles, though. The ritual. And he invites you to follow him deeper, and even deeper, always deeper.

Deeper and deeper and Deeper.

I stumbled upon this album by chance at a Party, louder than usual, a beautiful girl named Lara was the impromptu DJ, a fantastic rockeuse conjuring sounds that seemed to come from distant and dark galaxies. As always, I was enthralled, while everyone else danced as if possessed by an ego at last unleashed from its restraints, I stood motionless, watching her in the dark, and noticed she was opening that vinyl, featuring that black girl and that white-feathered dress.

The otherwordly setlist was Shadow Pay a Visit; You! You! And then the triumphant finale of Show Time. On the dancefloor, some girls undressed, maybe from the heat or something Else, I remember. A whirlwind of shadows and electric fever rose up, as if Minimal Man had pressed onto vinyl the rattle of a dying soul, all against the shameless laughter of a cruel god. In a desert of mirrors where the wandering dancer witnessed the slow, gradual disintegration and pulverization of their pretty reflected face. Beneath that blazing Black Sun. The gift of conciseness. And with this phrase, having purposefully pushed away 95% of humanity, let us return to caring for that 5% of friendly survivors.

Minimal Man’s Safari shows up at your door low profile, a reassuringly ambiguous smile, escaped from some frame of Haneke’s Funny Games. The Album next door with that cover full of mystery—but beware. Like a sinuously nervous, feverish sonic organism, it will sneak in and settle into your living room, asking only for a little jovial hospitality, all the while hiding that dark side. Distrust yourself. Distrust your comfort zone. That intersection between the expressionist brutality of Californian industrial and the vim clorex melancholy of European post punk, that friction between pulsing sheet metal and visceral backgrounds—those of the San Francisco school, orbiting around Tuxedomoon, Factrix, the more oblique Residents—and the wildest urges of the New York no wave, with Mark Pauline sculpting vocal lines as if they were bent metal plates (That’s Where the Sin Is is one of the most beautiful post punk tracks I’ve ever heard). Clandestine metallurgy as the synths oscillate between the austerity of a slowed-down Suicide and the synthetic paranoia of Chrome. That deliberately raw production recalls the DIY aesthetics of the earliest Ralph Records releases, but with an even more abrasive edge, almost proto-EBM, where the drum machines tirelessly pound now deformed chassis—Shadow Pay A Visit—and the guitars, often reduced to mere white noise, evoke both the dissonance of Glenn Branca and the obsessive minimalism of Cabaret Voltaire.

Slowly, I moved closer to Lara. I was Shadow among the shadows. I found again. I recognized, in the darkness, that suffering. That trace of that blade, broken, visible and lodged in her chest. Her red lipstick was the sun of that room, she was inevitably lost in her music. In her blond hair, the glow of that sun that has known the madness of angels and the cruelty of deserts. Even condemned souls can still shine, and beauty, when it chooses a face, turns it into destiny.

- What’s Not There - Suddenly she locks eyes with me from the console, and smiling, sings Show Time to me.

[Chorus]
Show time!
Show time!
She whispers
Show time!

Bubbles when the undress
And the sound rushed to the vein
Now she was
Out at the undress
She had nothing on underneath
[Chorus]
Show time!
Show time!

Dancing or trembling as if in a carnival haunted by a sandstorm, Safari is the soundtrack of this perdition. First, distrust yourself, distrust your certainties. Water your doubts. That’s Where the Sin Is will then whisper to you with the voice of a serpent that knows the taste of the first sin. In this personal musical extension of Patrick Miller’s nervous system, leader of Minimal Man, we are on the boundary line, post punk that brushes against minimal wave and grazes darkwave. Ambiguity that reflects Miller himself, a marginal, self-destructive artist, marked by heavy drug use and a biography that would end tragically with his death from complications related to hepatitis C in 2003; but it was exactly this marginality that allowed him to build an authentic language, far from trends and fashions, as distant from theatrical goth as from pure industrial noise. Sick but True.

And how can I forget Lara’s last smile: me, in the idiocy of the moment, just thanking her at the end of the party for introducing me to this artist. The Gift of Conciseness. Her flowing blond hair, on the other hand, leaving the scene forever, she, wrapped in an embrace with one of her friends, moving further and further away, becoming only a light stroke...just a dot. Show Time.