Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Various Artists
Label: ZARŠ Records
Released: 2015
Rating: 3.5/5
As it has every year for the past 15 years, this year’s pulse of musical experimentation has crawled into the world, courtesy of the alternative rock project »Klubski Maraton«. The ever-so-daring and provocative Radio Študent label, dear to us all, keeps racking up the miles on its endless road with it.
The new compilation is every bit as bold and provocative as its predecessors from past years. It offers a peek into the musical visions of six hopeful, ambitious bands, whose visionary streak carries just enough prickly interest that their contributions can’t go unnoticed on this disc, let alone unheard, as the new reality of the Slovenian alternative rock underground.
Enough of the introductory »chirping«, let’s get straight to the substance. Six bands multiplied by two songs each makes 12 original tracks in total. You’ve probably worked out through all this heavy math that every band delivers two original songs to this CD. It opens just as noisy, raw and garage-y as you’d expect, with Void by HAY. Built on a trivial line of four basic chords, with a »hollow« vocal choir echoing in the background, drenched in the psychotic, schizophrenic dissonance of the delivery itself, it embodies the exact feeling of falling into a bottomless pit. Emptiness. Dark, mildly stoned. The song Raw adds even more mischief, a touch of semitone kinetics and a fresh helping of satisfyingly alt-sneering snark from a band that is still looking for its own authorial ID card. The busted, creaky suspension of the sound builds an avalanche-like mass and diligently fills the spatial hole in a sonic picture that could easily have come out of simple, repetitive phrases.
Haiku Garden are interesting alternative rock »babies«, mostly because of their unusual fixation on the roots of new wave, especially the sound of dark wave or post-punk from the eighties. Picture the heavily warped sounds of old-school The Smiths or The Cure. The sonic picture is filled by a saccharine yet dissonant vocal line and a prominent, melodic bass line. The guitars hang around in half-clean, at times crunchy, simple chord progressions, and wind into plain single-string ornament lines, with occasional string bends and the gratifying twisting of the melodic way out that follows. Both Until Then and Homely show that the band has already found the foundations on which to build its musical expression, right from the starting blocks.
MeduzaleM, experimental alternative rock tinkerers from the Karst, released their solo studio debut last year and used it to very effectively show off their musical character, which has plenty of exploratory deliriums based on free-spirited jamming with a real ego-trip vibe. On the two new songs, MeduzaleM make it clear that their tracks are still long. Switching from English to Slovenian is new. The band still likes to slip in musical lines that »bust up« the predictable musical formatting and so come across as atonal. The vocals then follow along adventurously. The moment of spontaneity and unpredictability is held back but not optimized, since it lacks a bigger dose of experimental shock. The alternative rock bubbling is skillfully spiced with layered rhythmic kinetics. Sometimes the band’s insistence on repeating 4/4 pigeonholes gets a bit annoying, which means the songs are a tad too long (or the motifs are not yet exploited enough in the arrangements, depending on how you look at it). But let’s not jump to conclusions. This band will surely surprise with its next record. What matters is that MeduzaleM are developing a eclecticism all their own, harder to pin down by genre, with occasional chaos and derailment, and they bring the late Corkscrew to mind.
Muzikačaka is a kind of indie D.I.Y. trip with just one name behind it. That name is Sara Korošec, a Haloze native, who takes care of the whole sonic identity of the songs Kužna nespečnost and Konzumirat. The twisting of the soundscape, using new-age takes on old-school synthesizing, comes out of a simple, unpretentious niche of musicality. Through that backdrop Sara chews her way with her heavily effected vocal, which sounds extraterrestrial, as if it were coming from the »beyond«, deepening a cerebral, trippy experience that’s not hard to deal with in the realm of cybernetic repetitiveness of Sara’s musical vision and conceptual perception, which, put simply, is just her own thing.
Nevemnevem is a band you simply can’t strip of its standout noisy mischief. The band moves completely unburdened, free-wheeling, with no overcomplicating. Exploring sonic expanses, it fills the landscape with grimacing implants of woodwinds, which serve to fill out the sonic picture and don’t flirt with jazz. The band is definitely an interesting musical offshoot of the Slovenian alternative rock underground. The poetry is caught in recitals that echo robotically in the effected air, as if dictated by programmed machines on the verge of artificial intelligence self-awareness. The poetry’s messages are a satirical parody of the delusions of the neoliberal order, and perfectly biting. That said, the extended jam wizardry within the 12-minute Mehanizem alge is a step too far and at best tires the listener out, since the point of the song is revealed much earlier. So I suggest trimming the arrangements. Unless, by some miracle, the band starts developing toward RIO/avant prog rock, which is in fact about as likely as zero.
With the songs Coffee Capital and Memories Are Lo-Fi, Persons From Porlock combine interesting moments of rock psychedelia with a garage echo. The whole thing actually draws on the boldly organic, old-school sonic grimacing of the early seventies, yet the alternative rock stance remains undisguised. In the phrases, the band even sounds stoner-stoned. The psychedelically detached and even stoned vocal works amazingly well and is very satisfying. An utterly bonkers band of retro-sound manners, caught in a niche of contemporary spheres of music-making.
Klubski Maraton’s 15th mission has been a total success too. It’s bound to cheer you up and entertain you. But you have to approach it with serious listening to get at the starting points of self-evolution of the artists representing the compilation, otherwise your effort will be in vain.
Tracklist
1.KM15 – Popotnica (01:24)
2.HAY – Void (03:08)
3.Haiku Garden – Until Then (03:42)
4.MeduzaleM – Grmada src (05:46)
5.Muzikačaka – Kužna nespečnost (04:19)
6.nevemnevem – Konvoj ustavljen (02:42)
7.Persons From Porlock – Memories Are Lo-Fi (04:51)
8.MeduzaleM – Inercia Y Gravedad (08:49)
9.HAY – Raw (02:39)
10.Haiku Garden – Homely (04:27)
11.Persons From Porlock – Coffee Capital (05:04)
12.nevemnevem – Mehanizem alge (11:59)
13.Muzikačaka – Konzumirat (06:12)
