Sunday 9 June 2013

Music - Part 92 - Wrekmeister Harmonies



Wrekmeister Harmonies – You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me (Thrill Jockey
LP
10 June 2013

This is an interesting beast if ever I heard one proving my theory that ‘everything deserves at least one listen’.  It would be tempting, if you’re not a fan of the drone genre to stop listening to You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me after nine or ten minutes but given slightly longer this grows into something rather wonderful.

The piece was written to accompany a film that Robinson had shot in the desert of Joshua Tree and the Tasmanian  forests.  It was recorded live in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and included avant garde and balck metal artists such as Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Jef Whitehead (Leviathan) and Nachmystium (Andrew Markuszewski).

What is a triumph is the slow and gradual progression of the track from almost monotone monotony to funeral doom in little over thirty-eight minutes.  The drone grows and grows into an enormous wall of distorted sound of crashing drums and screams before gradually slowing again and continuing with synthesized sounds as the moaning voices fall into the pit of Hell from whence they came.





A plucked Harp and orchestrals enter and You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me fades away into nothingness leaving your ears slightly confused as the big sounds seem to continue to resonate.

It’s an incredibly emotional and intelligent piece of work and one that fully deserves to be allowed to be listened to in its entirety, and, yet another brave release from those clever people at Thrill Jockey Records.  It’s not the sort of thing you’d play to your Grandma, but then again, would you really want to share something like this?

8/10

Links

Published on Louder Than War 8/06/13 - here





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