Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Various Artists
Label: Radio Študent
Released: 2012
Length: 49:25
Rating: 3/5
The question that keeps jumping to the front whenever we try to size up and dissect Slovenian alternative is whether this little country really has enough freshness and punch for Radio Študent to come up with a selection of new names every year that keeps lifting the colorful fan of genre eccentricities to a higher level than before. Considering that every single year in the past, more than a hundred acts, performances and garage wonders from our small country, itching for their debuts, have entered the call, the answer has to be a yes, and this year’s pick is no exception: the organizers squeezed in six new, rarely heard and thoroughly subversive names, on the theory that quality is simply a matter of selecting the best from our backyards. So I, too, approached the new release, the record Klubski Maraton 12, with a hefty dose of optimistic, sky-high expectations.
The record shows the young guns, guys and girls alike, at their best, proving that despite the general economic recession Slovenia is not short on influences that force us to redefine what alternative even means. This year’s noisiest musical menu, at least on first listen, makes it clear that quantity isn’t always a prerequisite for quality, though admittedly, to each their own. After an enthusiastic send-off that accompanied the new record on its trip around Slovenian clubs, the marathoners threw themselves into their work in a pretty ragged, very Radio Študent-homegrown way, and the first to drill into your brain are the noisy, minimalist sounds of the band from the village of Črni graben, The Kojn. The duo, made up of drummer and vocalist Miha Ovca and guitarist Marko Kos, delivers its vision of, let’s call it, articulated noise in a way that was already shaped in the now-defunct Schnaps, and in a short span of time they’ve already fired their full-length debut We Really Like Beautiful Flowers into the otherwise selective Slovenian market. The newer and so far unreleased track is the opener Gvišn, which fires off four chords in a little over a minute, and in a pretty direct “balls out” number the band’s basic recipe is laid out in very minimalist fashion – few chords, DIY subversive revolt, raw production that, in its effort not to fall into clichés, ends up being exactly that – a fusty, grubbily dusty conglomerate of punkish hardcore, full of phrases we’ve already heard, while the promised freshness, humor and positivity of madness somehow get lost under a ton of hot air. Since every band once again appears on the record with two original songs, I’ll take a slightly different approach in writing this review – a bit more thematically linked, rather than in step with the record’s chronology. The first ones up are, this time, also the last, closing out the record, and with the somewhat more rock-flavored closing act, the noisy track Rabit Hell Hole, The Kojn show a bit more of, well, a pop side too. It sounds like the White Stripes on a seriously paranoid grunge trip, and the stampede of drums and guitars unfolds into a still rather neat sweat-‘n’-roll delirious cry for salvation, which stamps the record with a mark I’ll say a little more about in the final act of the review.
Second up on the record are the fresh Ljubljana interpreters of the Balkan new wave. The quartet Čao Portorož is honestly one of the nicer surprises of this marathon test of attention and ear-canal cleanliness, an indie-rock homage to Belgrade giants like EKV and co. that gets a more punkish alternative continuation in an optimistic way. Partly because the band is marked by a colorful genetic makeup and a culturally broader range of tastes and integrated influences. Vocalist and bassist Ivan Kan Mujezinović, guitarists Gregor Andolšek and Anže Petrič and drummer Aljoša Cetinski manage to dress up a tribute to the nineties as a nicely playful combo of Partibrejkers and the sub-pop ethic of hard-hitting music-making, in which the Serbo-Croatian mellifluous vocal in the song Ču is just right for provoking and luring the ear canals. Anže, on the other hand, is dirtier and more stoner, almost completely incompatible with the first matrix we heard, but for totally reinterpreting their own music, and for an exceptionally good balance of interesting guitar riffs and just-cheeky-enough, above all juicy bass, the guys deserve full praise. The drums and vocals are a bit under-produced, at least to my taste, but Ivan’s vocal, in its smoky incarnation, is paranoid enough to give the band a special shine, which this year’s Maraton damn well needs.
More tripped-out, laid-back shades of hypnotic, form-free improvisation steer us into stranger waters with the band Trus! and the song Whale Song. The trio, made up of bassist Jelena Rusjan, synth-wielding Boštjan Simon and drummer Peter Šuklar, doesn’t suffer from dance-euphoria syndrome; their garage-soaked pop flirts with the punk of Elastica and the alternative patterns of Prekmurje’s Manul, and the guy and the girl also list Škrip Orkestra, Vanilla Riot and Kombo Zlatka Kaučiča among their references. What does that tell us about the band? Nothing, if we’re honest, since they’re more devoted to live experimentation than to formal aesthetics, and the synth bleeps could probably use some guitar backup, because the minimalist Jamaican rasta trip (at least the vocals are reaching for some ya man articulation) is more of an artsy surrender to fractalizing sound than a delivery of any meaningful slogans. Still, Trus! are a lovely act that conditionally even surprises. The ninth track of this musical head cheese, the easygoing Tenderness, also lands in context nicely and unforced, but there’s certainly no serious excellence here. Not the way there is with bands like Sphericube, Coma Stereo and the like, and trips into the realms of the sonically unheard that I like better. Trus! are closer to child’s play and repetitive hypnosis than to some trip-hop launch into a universe of galactic nebulae or whatever …
Timo Chinala, on the other hand, bets on a more tried-and-tested breakbeat recipe and one-man electronic play with sound. The pseudonym hides Prekmurje producer Timotej Bertalanič, and the track No Good already makes clear that alongside organic alt music-making, the Prekmurje backwoods are also home to a more silicone sound of greasy bass and dubby or dubstep-ish answers in a physics-soaked world. Timo Chinala keeps the link to old-school electronica, and the memory of Snap and the damn overplayed jingles from the nineties MTV channel sneaks into your mind quite bizarrely; the tracks, in some strange way, urge you to sway rather than dance, but they certainly convincingly dissolve the metric for measuring time, and amid the repetitive play with rhythm, fat bass and samples, the mononuclear notation of one single person’s musical vision can’t be accused of being boring. The second-longest track on the record, The Sound Of You Walking Away, also follows the established drive toward sonic perfectionism, and Timo Chinala adds everything to the reactive mix of darkened electro – besides planes, echoes, degraded bass and thunder, also a perfect balance across all the building blocks. Despite all that perfectionism, though, the club-tinted trance sounds more at home alongside the DJ cream of the coastal Ambasada than in a hexagram of names promising decidedly less sophisticated music on this record, if I may be a little sarcastic.
After the inorganic release of bodily fluids and the opening of all the subconscious valves, and after the pouch ran out of more polished gems on the record (at least where electronics are concerned), Foe Spre Glass Om take a gluttonous bite out of their slice of the cake, with less impressive electronics. Supposedly enthused by current electro trends, brothers Dejan (on guitar, synth and drum machine) and bassist Denis Ilješ, together with guitarist Miloš Skakić, put on a rather poor show of industrial in the Laibach manner. Never mind that time is gold, they tangle themselves in repetitive rhythms that you’d, in a more complete and enriched version of course, credit to Tricky and Massive Attack, while the Slovenian take on trip-hop is rurally furrowed and damn irritating. There’s a lot of needless ballast and rambling that just won’t end. Neither the song Really nor Favour lifts the music to a higher level, and the gloomily doped-up techno is gothically destructive and pessimistic. The trio steers its way through the labyrinths of idea-unraveling clumsily, with a feel comparable to the grace of elephants in a china shop, but yes, Foe Spre Glass Om really are something special in their own demented way, I agree!
After an honest dose of laxatives comes a bit of relaxation in a more inventive direction, and the saviors of good taste are talented guys from Novo mesto and Ljubljana. Rok Zalokar Trio gravitates between the central Slovenian metropolis and the Lower Carniola capital, and after only a year of making music together, the band’s mastermind, keyboardist Rok Zalokar, bassist Dejan Hudoklin and drummer Jože Cesar have an exceptional feel for collective improvisation, and the fragile balance of all the building blocks doesn’t tip over into destroying the beautiful in either act of the piece Snežna gmota. The symmetry of club jazzing, of playing with standards and rhythm, and above all with the fact that once the piano is front and center, every slip in the musicians’ chemistry is that much more audible, shows how the guys have successfully developed a wordless communication that mirrors seasoned old cats in smoky clubs with black-flavored music. There’s no shortage of hypnotic moments either, since the second act, Snežna gmota II, is even saltier and less bathed in optimistic light in character, and the bass in Dejan’s hands sounds lovely as a solo instrument too. Memories of bands like Weather Report (but without the synths and the more optimistic undertones, though somewhere in the background you might catch a pinch of enthusiasm for Jaco Pastorius), Mahavishnu Orchestra (or more of Billy Cobham in the song Heather) and the piano-tinged Japanese band Mouse On The Keys come to life instantly, and this time I’m not counting such references as a minus. Of course, the sentimental note is entirely Rok Zalokar’s and company’s own, and I have to admit that, young age notwithstanding, they’re real virtuosos at what they do. And who knows – maybe in their own unusual way this even brings them a win at this year’s marathon? It all depends on the alignment of the stars and a pinch of good taste among the jurors …
With the best of the best I’ve thus managed to claw my way to the bottom of the mystery of the already twelfth marathon of Klubski Maraton, but I have to admit that this time no great peaks or revolutionary revelations could be detected. Still, the twelfth act left enough room for further improvements and upgrades, I’d repeat my standard, already stated opinion. Next year’s harvest of listening could be even better and, above all, sonically punchier, and l’art-pour-l’art-ism could give up some of its place to juicier, more substantial fruits of the Slovenian underground, now flooded as it is. There shouldn’t be a shortage of good names, but there’s no need, in a drive for self-proof and an eternal subversive pissing into the wind, for the thirteenth edition to deepen the gap between a well-articulated, clever idea and more obscurely pointless ideas that would need a bit more time to ripen and evolve inside, giving individual integral parts a chance at longer-lasting existence, because after a marathon through the guts of Slovenian clubs, you have to make sure in advance that you can still take a leap beyond the frame of our narrow-minded pigsty. And some of this year’s nominees aren’t completely ready for that game and that dance yet, which is, absolutely, only a matter of my own personal and flawed opinion and taste …
Lineup
FOE SPRE GLASS OM:
Dejan Ilješ – guitar, synth, drums, drum machine
Denis ilješ – bass
Miloš Skakić – guitar
THE KOJN:
Miha Ovca – drums, vocals
Marko Kos – guitar, vocals
TIMO CHINALA:
Timotej Bertalanič – mixers, samplers, synth
ČAO PORTOROŽ:
Ivan Kan Mujezinović – bass, vocals
Gregor Andolšek – guitar, vocals
Anže Petrič – guitar
Aljoša Cetinski – drums, screams
TRUS!:
Jelena Rusjan – bass, vocals
Boštjan Simon – synth
Peter Šuklar – drums
ROK ZALOKAR TRIO:
Rok Zalokar – piano
Dejan Hudoklin – bass
Jože Cesar – drums
Production
Samo Pavlica, Jure Vlahovič, Marko Trstenjak, Andrej Kocan, Timotej Bertalanič
Tracklist
- KM 12 – Popotnica
- The Kojn – Gvišn
- Čao Portorož – Ču
- Trus! – Whale Song
- Timo Chinala – No Good (Dub Version)
- Foe Spre Glass Om – Really
- Rok Zalokar Trio – Snežna Gmota I
- Rok Zalokra Trio – Snežna Gmota II
- Trus – Tenderness
- Timo Chinala – The Sound Of You Walking Away
- Foe Spre Glass Om – Favour
- Čao Portorož – Anže
- The Kojn – Rabit Hell Hole
