Artist: Various Artists
Label: Radio Študent
Released: 2013
Length: 62:23
Rating: 3.2/5
I never get an answer to the most important question of all – does the Slovenian alternative scene keep spawning new names, and can the kids really squeeze out the sheer amounts of alternative subversion that Radio Študent’s Klubski Maratons beam out every year? Or is it all one big con on the Slovenian listening public, with project bands that barely exist for five minutes yet carve their slice of the studio pie straight off the tab of state-donated money, in RŠ’s minestrone of less-listened-to and generally less-promoted music? Fair enough – with its editorial policy, Radio Študent ordered itself years ago to keep its fingers away from anything that might promise commercial marketability. But after all the »sellouts« have cleared out – and among them were quite a few names who ended up on big stages thanks to their quality, not because of any urge to sell off their mental property – there’s apparently still plenty left on the shelves of the no-, badly or somewhat-less-digestible products of sonic rebellion against the norms. This year’s Klubski Maraton 13 is a collage (or goulash) of exactly that, serving the audience the usual, well-known »surprises«. A dozen tracks from the fingers of six incomparable, competing runners on the club boards can’t exactly boast loads of experience or mileage – but it’s true that this year we get names you couldn’t hear on records or in the guts of alternative temples of culture in previous years.
The mysterious sonic construct that opens things, Christian Koupa, is an interesting one. At first listen it offers eccentric soundscapes of total sonic experiment with static and a milieu of sounds, with a personal, aesthetically polished touch. Kristjan Kroupa is a 22-year-old with a drone-perfected sonic language, and under the fingers of a refined knob-twiddler the first thing to seep out is a mystical, foggy substrate dklsfbr Eta Carinae, the closest thing here to a dense, heavy flash of ambient static. Sound generators and computers aren’t tools for l’art-pour-l’art blather here; what’s going on is genuinely avant-garde and planned. The thickening and crumbling of chunks of fragmented noise is dripped out asymmetrically and with recognizable character, not naively or pushily. The ominous The Three Ages Of Man And Death follows the same key, raised above the quality level of past electronic oratorios by this young avant-garde defender of drone noise glitch in Slovenia. Christian Kroupa is a name we’ll surely be hearing more of, thanks to his production polish and the strength of his ideas, but above all thanks to the flawless execution of tracks you won’t be dancing to, yet which reflect the demonic, ominous times in which we zombie-like languish today.
On the other side of the fence, the Novo mesto crew Bipolar Disorder offer something completely different. A DIY punkoid stampede with a sinister undertone of HC, grinder vibes and metalized down beats. A band barely a year old, showing signs of vital, revolting, critical rage against the social postulates of society. Zok, guitarist and backing throat of the band, explosive drummer lady Tena, lead guttural chakra bearer Sandro and bassist Jon – a point from the review of the demo tape Razpadanje po koščkih – beam two bipolar-disordered tracks into your ears and homes this time. Circle and Ciciban fight under the banner of active revolution, and with the ragged sounds of a defragmented march between crust, guttural vocals and poorly played metal and grind, slogans like »Fight for power – earthcrust« become practically mandatory. The suspended Ciciban grabs me more; it starts out considerably more balanced, then the boys and the girl move into the core of a little song about a small indoctrinated brat, who gets nicely violated by the entire state education apparatus with the catheters of socialization and conventionalization. True to their name, Bipolar Disorder decide to pour and mix a scoop or two of more grotesque, less thought-out brutalized crap into the more articulate moments, but hey, that’s artistic freedom and the right to self-determination, or simply a matter of taste. I won’t get into the latter at this stage of contemplation.
A rabble-rousing construct of supposedly more advanced punkoid rebellion against the machinery of society only comes next, in the form of a rustically set-up impersonator of punk legends from the genre’s golden age (Diego Menendes reminds me of a homegrown version of Joey Ramone, at least visually) plus the Balkanoid derivatives that followed from our side of the mental universe. Menendes Brothers is a band in the image and name of a single individual, who figures he can be everything and that there’s no need to even mention anyone else. The song Ja sam sagradio ovaj grad professes the wish that if someone gave birth to something and created it, they also have the right to tear it down. I can hardly call this counterproductive ballast of political inarticulateness in the theater of the absurd something unheard-of or advanced, and despite his dilettante and unusual stance, Diego with his lukewarmness doesn’t grab me much. The exotic meal of a track, Eno mrtvo žensko z zeljem prosim, doesn’t either. Fuck! Some people are ready to shit all over just about anything from the stage for a few seconds of their »glory«, so corpses and a craving for necrophilic dining are nothing strange, but I don’t know what the dadaist construct of total repetitive pointlessness is supposed to add?
Much tastier to me are the stoner puffs of rhythm and melodic playfulness from my personal favorites of the first half of the record – Ilirska Bistrica veterans Reverend Haze. Out of the heavy metal hatchery and bands like Diego, Sekire and Devastated, something compact and potent has come this time. Stoner with metalized balls cuts loose with the track Slayer, and the quintet, with a smoky oracle behind the wheel, puffs it out nice and greasy in good company too – you know, that super-famous Chinese girl named Deja Vu. Reminiscent of bands like Lowrider, with more Faith No More-style vocals than Kyus-style tripping, and similar delights of the smoky universe, it lets you know that Slovenia still has some damn tasty smoked goods in stock. The guitar duo of Robi Miškič and Matej Gombač serves up lovely smeared solos and rhythmic passages, onto which the rhythm duo of Simon Boštjančič on bass and Martin Čendak on drums sticks nicely, while Klemen Logar’s vocals are merely the cherry on top of very well thought-out compositions. The latter could use a little extra hardening and production polish, but I’m convinced that with their well-rehearsed rhythmizing and playing with the sweet structures of desert stoner, Reverend Haze will go far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwjjyvAJluA
The noisier moment of the record comes courtesy of the Mr. Bungle-ish Koromač. Until recently a trio from Vrtojba (with extras), they serve up some seriously above-standard spiced noise. Besides the ambient squeals of Aljaž Škrlep’s guitar, the jazzy playfulness of Urban Kušar’s drums and Matjaž Bajc’s bass, there’s room in the group for additional percussion and drums from Žiga Ipavec, experimental incursions of unexpected guitar metrics from Peter Krastin, and saxophone and flute outbursts from Jure Boršič. Fuck the crust punk HC vocabulary of the past – jazz is better for mindfucking the audience! And it’s exactly this wordless playing with meter, patterns and stereotypes that these excellent articulators of carnival-spiced noise swear by. Sexy! The ass-reeking Anal Talk convinces completely, and when a herd of fat elephants comes thundering into the whole thing and Koromač serve you a bit of Elephant Stampedo, it’s clear we’ve landed another group in the shortlist who, with a bit more effects-driven foundation, could compete as a support act for my beloved Demolition Group too. Koromač don’t have the lyrical poetics of the Brežice veterans, since they have no vocalist (for now), but musically they’re a pleasantly playful collective of six free-thinking, sharply alert individuals who’ve given the concept of club noise a more articulate and lovely ring – and let that not be a swear word for everyone who swears by nothing but disobedience!
Considerably more disobedient is the final band, which tops the decibel levels of its predecessors by a good few shades. Ontervjabbit is a duo of Hrastnik artists with quite a lot of musical mileage. Besides Neven M. Agalma, who has left his mark on stages as Dodecahedragraph too, there’s also Domen Učakar by his side, a member of Icarus Down and Neon Spektra. Ontervjabbit are carriers of heavyweight noise, mysteriously weaving compact monoliths of synthesized, manipulative cosmicness into very extreme drone meter. There’s improvisation aplenty, since the decibel leap into the red zone I can easily associate with a sonic recording of a supernova explosion (if only the vacuum of space could carry a speck of the sound of total cataclysm into our airy and anxious atmosphere of this quadrant of planetary solitude). The opening Alpha Programmer is a total expression of the inner feelings of two talented sonic megalomaniacs, and with the closing cut Stud, this year’s Klubski Maraton squeezes the last few tons of more provocative golden noise out of the bowels of the club scene.
I’m glad that this year’s Klubski Maraton 13 has exceeded the rather battered expectations of past years with a good few genuinely high-quality surprises. Still, I’ll keep calling out, attentively and critically, the fact that low-quality moments of ideaslessness and pointlessness slip so easily through the selectors’ sieve into the bundle of six chosen ones. Why not weave in six strong acts, where it would be hard to pick a favorite and where the losers couldn’t be picked out after the first listen, after just a few bars of secret poetry? I’m convinced that Slovenia has more critical spirit and more quality on offer. This year plenty of it could be heard on the marathon trek through the clubs, which shows that even on this side of the Alps, the more »demanding« or simply snobbish alternative customers can get something more than an l’art-pour-l’art veil of overinflated avant-gardism that has nothing to do with music, with sincerity, and even less with listenability. Of course, it all depends on the yardstick and on what we’re measuring, but I doubt any of these sonic extremists would agree that their mental construct, their sonic child, is actually condemned to be cuddled by only a handful of people while spending most of its life in a darkened room in total isolation from the world. The Klubski Maraton runners walk even such degenerate absurdities of the musical underground across the stages, which is commendable, but I still think that everything takes its time, and the transformation of musicians and individualists into operational groups all the more so. After a month (or a year) a thing can’t be fit for sowing among the masses, if there’s at least a gram of criticism and selectivity in mind, or at least a bit of a mature sense of taste, which, once again, we won’t be debating today. The thing is worth some thought, and the Maraton needs another polish, I’d say, and with that I conclude this time’s litany. Amen!
Lineup
CHRISTIAN KROUPA:
Kristjan Kroupa – sound generators, mixers, computer
BIPOLAR DISORDER:
Zok – guitar and vocals
Tena – drums
Sandro – vocals
Jon – bass
MENENDES BROTHERS:
Diego Menendes – vocals, others unknown
REVEREND HAZE:
Robi Mikšič – guitar
Matej Gombač – guitar
Simon Boštjančič – bass
Martin Čendak – drums
Klemen Logar – vocals
KOROMAČ:
Matjaž Bajc – bass
Aljaž Škrlep – guitar
Urban Kušar – drums
Žiga Ipavec – drums, percussion
Peter Kastrin – guitar
Jure Boršič – saxophone
ONTERVJABBIT:
Neven M. Agalma & Domen Učakar – sound manipulators, sound generators, synthesizers, mixers and computers
Production
Jure Gruden, Gašper Kojek, Rok Kovač,Samo Pavlica, Christian Koupa, Ontervjabbit
Tracklist
1. KM13 – Popotnica
2. Christian Koupa – Eta Carinae
3. Bipolar Disorder – Circle
4. Menandes Brothers – Ja sam sagradio ovaj grad
5. Reverend Haze – Slayer
6. Koromač – Anal Talk
7. Ontervjabbit – Alpha Programmer
8. Christian Koupa – The Three Ages Of Man And Death
9. Menendes Brothers – Eno mrtvo žensko z zeljem prosim
10. Koromač – Elephant Stampedo
11. Bipolar Disorder – Ciciban
12. Reverend Haze – Deja Vu
13. Ontervjabbit – Stud
