International Peoples Gang - Action Painting
The latest release from duo Martyn Watson and Ric Peet dovetails nicely with the resurgence of the em:t label as a waystation for the electronically adventurous. Action Painting is a lysergic curiosity, an aural psychedelic landscape that has a kinaesthetic impact upon the listener. Watson and Peet throw classically-minded electronics, contextually-adrift discourse, warped recordings of fuzzed guitar and a hint of dub at a blank canvas where they let it slide together, mixing and melding until a more-or-less stable state is reached.
The looping melody of "AC Harmonics" may have come from a guitar once upon a time, but it has been warped into a sound palette that is reminiscent of a bent harmonium. While breezes of classical strings and deploring electronics cascade around the looped melody, crystalline percussion drops dewy trails in the wake of the swelling melodies. "Stretch" is a nocturnal pastiche -- a mimetic pastoral of chimes, bell tones, vaporous electronics and brittle backmasking that brings to mind a city in winter: glassy streets, lantern light flickering beneath a film of ice, white smoke curling in abstract symbols from soot-darkened chimneys, snow flecking the hibernating trees.
The music of "Myopic" is nearly hidden beneath the foreground recording of a physical therapy session. It is a drift of drones that rises out of the encouraging dialogue and deposits us in the "Waiting Room," yet another interstitial piece. Filled with the reverb of guitar strings, "Waiting Room" redecorates the musical headspace into the experimental chill lounge of "That Time Already?" As if you have been blindfolded, lead across town by the elbow, left in an elevator, which in turn took you to a mysterious grotto where fat beats, string quartets, a meandering breeze from the South Seas and a DJ with a crate of old funk records greet you as if the party has been waiting for you to arrive.
There's a sense of falling down the rabbit hole with Action Painting, a constant sonic disorientation that both envelops and repulses you. Anne Papiri's voice on "Fireworks" wants to seduce you, but the music darts and swarms around you like so many wild birds -- fireworks, even -- that distraction is constant. Until the birds all roost and, accompanied by the noisy burr of cell phone static, fall into an avian lullaby that swiftly calms your restlessness. The swirling voices of "Polite State" intoning "Yes," "No," "Thank you, please" contribute to the hypnologic state introduced by the bird song of "Fireworks." I can't even remember what galaxy I'm in as the solar flares of "Shimmer" begin to fall around me.
Classical guitar, modified bird song, and deft beat programming greet our return to this earthly aural space in "Mornin'," a paean to the dawn light that dapples away the night. A chaotic wash of strings and guitar represent the full flush of light that breaks the skyline and, just like that, the frozen life of night is blown away by the crescendoing texture of the day's movement. And, yet, for as gorgeously symphonic as "Mornin'" is, the subsequent "Granny Takes a Trip" is an inversion of crackling vinyl, electronic squiggles, distorted childhood nursery rhymes and deformed tones that, again, drains us down the rabbit hole. We are flushed into a world of echoing strings -- a phantasmal realm where cast-off symphonies go to lament their unfinished state.
Watson and Peet call Action Painting a "synaesthetic" record, a collection of aural vignettes that twist the senses. The collision of disparate instrumentation and styles certainly makes it feel like a surreal mash-up experience, but they never completely abandon us. The chaos of Action Painting feels guided, like International Peoples Gang are your drug gurus. They are your LSD guides who show you the door into the surreal psychedelic landscape but who always give you a way back to comfortable reality.
International Peoples Gang
em:t [2006]
music
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