Fire Talk Records (label)
05 January 2022 (released)
05 January 2022
Ker-Punk? Deep-rave? Techno-Yes? Savant-Garde?
Metallic, mechanic and Gallic, post-industrial bleakness meets past-terrestrial sleekness, outer-space colliding with inner-place. Anglophonic Franco-moans, illegibly intelligible. All this and MORE on the mysteriously named Mandy, Indiana’s debut EP the enigmatically named ‘…’
The trio (Scott Fair on guitar/production; Valentine Caulfield with vocals/lyrics; Liam Stewart providing percussion) have concocted a triptych of textural noise, contextual poise and gestural ploys.
Informed (and deformed) by the cinematic and literary outputs of enfant terrible Gaspar Noe, screen surrealist Leos Carax and narco-Scot Irvine Welsh, the EP (three tracks, two remixes) conjures up nightmarish visitations, unnerving visages and hypnotic images. Sometimes all at once.
‘Bottle Episode’ is coordinated clatter, found sounds converted into orchestrated matter. As chaos becomes order Caulfield’s exhorted and eviscerating French fancies carefully conduct a sonic maelstrom.
‘Nike of Samothrace’ (a 2nd-century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory) continues the narrative retinue then ascends/descends into an industrial cacophony, claustrophobic and freeing in unequal measures. Club Eat’s rendition reworks and reshapes, applying a metronomic beat in contrast with accelerated vocals crafting a new dissonance.
‘Alien 3’ pulsates, vibrates, oscillates, throbbing absorption that pierces, pricks, prods the psyche, hypnogogic hallucinations, like a frazzled, frenzied Stereolab, an internal collapse facing up to the realities of eternal relapse. Daniel Avery’s remix upturns the shockwork horrorshow, terror-forming the e-scape and signposting the exit to the the a-maze.
What at first glance and listen could be received as an experimental jam session with no end product rewards the patient upon repeated sittings.
