Location: Ljubljana / Gala hala / Slovenia
Date: 25.04.2013
The Puzzled is yet another “off-the-wall” project. It’s an alliance of four musicians from home scenes devoted to strict musical experimentation and free-spirited exploration. You could call it a fusion of the “not-yet-fused.” The driving engine of The Puzzled is bassist Tibor Mihelič Syed, a regular member of Katalena, and he’s joined in The Puzzled by his longtime companion, accordionist Marko Brdnik (Miusow Quartet, occasionally guesting with Katalena), drummer Marko Lasič, who recently launched the band Trus!, and guitarist Mario Babojelič, who came aboard last of the bunch, since he didn’t play on the studio release. Four masters of their musical craft in one pile, then.
Gala hala. The classic refuge. When you get there, nobody can say exactly when the gig starts. Any gig. This time was no different. Even though it was almost ten at night already. Is there any more “alternative” lesson to be learned in the mecca of alternative life in the Slovenian capital? Hardly.
Keeping company with a can of beer, time crawled by at a snail’s pace, and a little past half past ten the stage was finally taken, first by Marko Brdnik and then Mario Babojelič next to him. The venue was hazy, and in the background, at the other end of the club where the silhouettes of the crowd lazily clustered, you could hear Gala hala’s own house fixture Jani Mujič, the legendary bassist of the even more legendary 2.2.2.7., ordering the techs around: “Blow a bit more smoke onto the stage!” The ambience was greeted by dimly flickering spotlights, and a good 70 nosy folks had gathered in the room, mostly the band’s buddies, fellow players in the music business, plus a few gourmets who like to treat themselves to “eclectic” musical concoctions. In fact, they’re the only ones who really root for them. You couldn’t poke at the heart of the self-grown artistic character of the musical craft any better than by going to a The Puzzled gig.
The band opened with a long instrumental, which they used mostly to warm up their fingers. An Apple on stage meant the sound would be further enriched with sonic manipulation of spontaneously branching shades. Babojelič came across as a perfectly natural pick for the band in that respect. In just under an hour the band played their entire studio debut, “Bad Times for Bedtime Stories.”
Considering this was the band’s first show, you could feel that they were still “feeling out” the room, looking for feedback, for the surroundings’ reaction to the fact of a new musical essence in that very space. Because of that, the gig had a sense that the band had to pay somewhat more attention to calibrating its parts so the system wouldn’t accidentally fall apart. Even though the dynamic development of events was slightly held back as a result, the quartet got over its initial stage shuffling with the exceptional experience of long-lived defiance on the scene across various projects and bands, and of course with a top-notch command of their playing.
Most of the gig revolved around the central figure of The Puzzled, bassist and singer Syed, who is also the main author of the music and poetry on The Puzzled’s debut. In his musical visionary streak, the man (and jaw harp lover) is a proven oddball. So the move to bring his own combo to life isn’t just excellent, it’s almost necessary, or the only logical thing to do. With his highly pronounced musical intelligence, he makes a decisive contribution to the colorfulness of what the present-day Slovenian music entertainment park has to offer. Let’s hope we’ll see more collaborations like this in Slovenia in the future, between musicians of a similar, multilayered, finely carved musical profile.
The band develops a self-grown musical character with a strictly eclectic stance, fusing a multitude of genre starting points, and in places even touches on the logic of shaping musical drama that would be tailor-made for a film backdrop. If Rootless is the herald of an exceptional jazz rock fusion with the occasional integration of ethno melos elements, taken care of mainly by Brdnik’s accordion (doubled with Babojelič’s guitar lines), then the more demanding Time Withouth Her Is Wasted is the point where the whole substantive core of the combo is captured in the most fitting use of the musical branching that the band generates in the basic cues of its artistic approach.
Syed put his vocal approach to excellent use and implemented it in The Puzzled’s musical vocabulary. Lower-pitched, manly growling, at times hollowly dark, the dramatic character of the clearly crafted charisma of his performance would, to put it crudely, be easiest to describe as an inspired stroll through the vocal interpretations of Nick Cave, Jim Morrison, and Johnny Cash too. Syed’s vocal is the biggest bringer of the pronounced darkness that The Puzzled’s vibe carries. That makes it clear that the figure of alternative rock is plainly perceptible in the otherwise fragmented, progressive outcome of a constant, unexpected unfolding of events, through the merging of elements of jazz, ethno, blues, and psychedelia.
So let’s hope it won’t stay at just one gig, which served as the presentation of the band’s studio debut. The feeling that you couldn’t buy a CD at Gala hala during the gig confirmed that many bands in Slovenia still think too “artistically” or “bohemian” when it comes to promotion alone, which is a big shame. I remember a Miusow Quartet show way back when at Sax Pub in Trnovo. We had to hunt the band members down in the room after the gig and practically force them to dig copies of their CD out of their worn-out bags. A CD that’s so powerful in expression that in plenty of other countries it would have been reissued twice over long ago. The story of The Puzzled is similar, and let’s hope it doesn’t go unnoticed. It must not go unnoticed! I wish the band, from the bottom of my heart, as much artistic inspiration and creative charge as possible in their future music-making.
The band closed out the gig with the song In The Name Of G(o)ods! That’s the band’s “famous,” colorfully branching composition, which passes through a lazy introductory rhythmic ride and Syed’s brokenly immersive vocal into a later psychedelic blues eroticism of total drama, the kind that wouldn’t let even the devil himself sleep anymore. And your skin crawls, which proves that the musical message at the essence of The Puzzled is leavened from the right artistic dough. It’s beautiful both in its brutally jagged chaos and in the softly cushioned sweetness of its melody. Avant-garde and, because of that, wildly seductive!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
