Craig Stephen returns with another guest review ...
***
Blabbermouth – now there’s a band name and a half – are two
Englishmen with a long history in diverse and enigmatic acts. Lu Edmonds has
appeared in two versions of Public Image Ltd with John Lydon as well as The
Mekons and Billy Bragg’s band; Mark Roberts is a former member of The Godfathers
and has also played, ahem, with the Bay City Rollers. Thankfully, there’s none
of the Tartan boy band poppycock on Hörspiel (which translates as radio drama
in German).
It’s more interesting perhaps to note the guests, including throat
singer Albert Kuvezin, Mekons vocalist Sally Timms and “the Blabbermouth
Voice-Robot Ensemble”.
Over nine tracks you will hear singing or audio in Russian,
Turkish, Spanish, Japanese and even English as well as French-Canadian and
Tuvalan (from an obscure area of Siberia), and the ‘voices’ of Marx, Stalin,
Eisenhower and Tony Blair.
It’s an album that I don’t imagine being played on Radio
Happy; but it is an album whereby experimentation and challenging notions
abound.
The concept is a world, not too far in the future, where artificial
intelligence - AI - and robots have become our new rulers. It’s not a new idea
as sci-fi has been toying with the threat, if you like, for decades, but the
notion of humans being a helpless minority in a world of advanced, and fearful,
technology we have ourselves created, isn’t one that often gets much traction
in the music world.
Appropriately, Edmonds and Roberts use industrial,
post-punk, ambient and world music using everything from accordion to Hawaiian
guitar. It has a “let’s throw it all in and see what happens” feel about it.
So,
on ‘Facts
Don’t Lie’, the duo delve into weapons of mass destruction and
the fake-news underbelly via a cut-up of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s
role in the illegal war on Iraq that concludes with the irritating tones of
ex-British PM Tony Blair. And ‘Maschine-Fragment’ dissects the supposition that the last
freedom in a world of pervasive and invasive AI is art.
It isn’t by any means an easy listen, with Kuvezin’s throaty
modus operandi difficult to adjust to. And yet its pursuit of the notion of a
post-human world is intriguing and frightening; the usage of such diverse
musical instruments and sub-genres as well as the concept of “guest appearances”
from the dead and the living make for a body of work that ensures it will never
be afforded the status of a throwaway pop album.
No comments:
Post a Comment