Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Moveknowledgement
Label: Kapa Records
Release: 2007
Duration: 44:58
Rating: 5/5
Every band that ever steps into a studio has its records (or, better yet, in the singular: its one record) that you could provocatively call qualitative Rubicons, maxima, limits that only a few manage to break through or surpass, and that same bone sticks in the throat of even the valiant competition, if one can talk about such things in music and art at all. Years ago I fell, totally unsuspecting, into the sonic embrace of the cathartic, orderly chaos of inspired rhythms and melodies, after which the world was never the same, and the name of the Novo mesto outfit Moveknowledgement got stitched into my heart in golden letters. Definitively and without any fake bullshitting in the name of universal taste – thanks to just the right combination of distorted play with the metre of things heard before, yet reworked so damn thoroughly that there was neither a way nor a need to hunt for associations in this game of shadows and brilliant eruptions of pure inspiration. Thanks to the album predecessors, the promising beginnings that were the records Sun Sun and Ant People, I already knew the band well enough to know that, with the rapper’s voice of two-time national freestyle rap champion Miha Blažič a.k.a. N’Toko crowning a sonic construct of meditative guitar, fat bass, potent drums and atypically catchy analog-synthetic cries of keyboards, they had enough aces to put the Dolenjska capital on the map of dance phenomena in Slovenia, but I wasn’t nearly as well informed about all the details and nuances. Those revealed themselves gradually, with considerable help from my beloved companion, the guru of slightly different rhythms that weren’t so at home on my side of the sound ocean of the aware until then – my wife. After the first dive into the tidal waves of Nebukadnezar’s dark world, though, everything became different and fatally fateful.
In an age when we’ve built ourselves shiny new towers of a modern-day Babylon, and more chatter and (non)sense echoes from them than there are people, the third record, whose very name invites us to listen to the king who conquered, subdued and vanquished Syria and Israel and boosted the splendor and might of Babylonia, is something that grabs you on the intellectual side of the name alone. A name that in Akkadian script and pronunciation, Nabû-kuduri-usur (Nabu-kudur-uzur), means »Heaven protect the crown« or »the borders« or »the heirs«, hands the world a mental paradigm to contemplate. Do we listen and submit to the dictate of the great usurper, or is there a cynical, maybe even ironic undertone hiding behind the invitation and command, calling rational, free-thinking people to revolt and to stand in opposition to the modern-day catechisms and the mononucleotide insertion of the order of the expected and conventional? Since I was curious, I took on the challenge, which turned into a cathartic game with the powers of enchantment, and along a sinusoid of pure pleasure I gladly gave in to the rhythmic spell of the total danceability of a total fusion of hip-hop, alternatively bodybuilt funky dub on steroids and more-than-digestible electronics, if I may quote myself from the past, since I’ve written about this before. The key variable in this game of total success was the reduction in headcount, but above all the factor of total maturity, which only two years after Ant People pulled off an Einsteinian quantum leap into completely new dimensions of the total, unbridled punch of decibel-backed basses, the dirty eroticism of juicy sound and, at the same time, perfectly balanced suspense of not-in-the-least-boring playfulness, a perfect findfu(n)k to spite everyone who claimed that there was practically nothing left to add to rock and alternative, since, supposedly, everything had already been done and heard. How lovely to be wrong, and even lovelier to take a salvo of gorgeous aces to the head, which are by no means lacking on the album Listen To Nebukadnezar, also because pop, soul and sappiness have become a thing of the past, while Moveknowledgement are totalitarian, uncompromising structuralists of an eclectic, commercially previously unexploited musical form that isn’t necessarily unlistenable – to my ears, quite the opposite.
After the opening burst of Wein’s futuristic guitars, the nicely flowing rhythmic play of funk-minded Dejan Slak on bass and David Cvelbar behind the drums, and the screaming, exhibitionist genius of the sonically resonant guru of the black and white keys, the great Shekuza, the crown is neatly topped off by the tongue-lashing of the brutally metaphysical N’Toko. Full-on oomph, you’d say without hesitation. Listen To Nebukadnezar. The tale of the Illuminati, a new world of antigravitational laws and the intangibility of reality is a gorgeous, bloody collage of the world we live in and prop up with our norms of consuming everything the media force on us and psychiatrists prescribe, while we voluntarily give up our own freedom of choice, originality and distinctiveness. In a dictatorship you have to sink into the sea of grey, since everyone who sticks out above average ends up excluded, digested, squeezed out of the gears, out of the circle of trust, and with their allegory and presented vision of a new, fascistoid world order Moveknowledgement surrender to a futurism of danceability that doesn’t let up even further on. The cadaverously sweet sound of seventies funk gnaws its way into the cerebellum with the track Necrodog. Moveknowledgement borrow the form of Funkadelic, James Brown, Sly and his Family Stone, but fit it all into the frame of their own world of gravitational laws. The space jam of moogs, keyboards and the entire instrumentarium clicks neatly into N’Toko’s flow of associations, wonderful sparks of a racing train of thought and verbal vignettes, and instead of preaching, language here is just another instrument, pouring a juicy juice of slogans, revolt and brazen defiance of norms into the ears of mediocrity-accustomed Slovenia. The slogans hide in English disguises, the whole structure is outwardly devoted to pleasure and surrender to the addictive metre of a playful rhythm, while the indoctrination is fatal and final. The spectral rape of all the senses carries on sweetly with the brutal multilayering of Scilla in Karibda, which, in its dub structure, admittedly departs from the wordier rest of the record, while the demonic cries of the echoes of N’Toko’s voice stroll through the thicket of rhythm and melody in a direction where the young Novo mesto orator could easily stand beside the notorious lead throat of Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Tomahawk and the like –the great Mike Patton. This time the sonic penetration is the work of our own homegrown talent, my dears!
The chemical formula of reactive explosiveness continues with the excellent track Chemicals, followed by the bouncy, repetitive I Am Zorr, which after a looping intro moves into a build-up of rainbow-like sound modules, over which a possessed host of N’Toko’s cries pours out. It all looks more like a waterfall of sound, where the rustic sound of sweet keyboards finally anoints you and the refined touch of that dot on the i finishes you off, something only a band that has grown from individuals into a compact collective can pull off, and Muvekom have undoubtedly done just that. A Barcode is a futuristic echo, where the whole thing gets ever closer to the resonant soundtrack of the age and times we live in, dreamy and sunk in the half-sleep of our own existential dizziness. An atmospherically condensed substrate of crystal-clear guitar and a multilayered echo of electronics, static, space moves, after an opening several-minute collective meditation during which you can easily half-close your eyes and fall into a state of hypnosis, enchantment, submission to the dictate of the band’s perfect aesthetics and maturity, through a downtempo and a sensible shift in content, into a more metallized part that RATM would be extremely proud of – but let’s leave the name-dropping, since Moveknowledgement have earned a standing ovation with this track alone, which you can, please, only prolong. Maybe the seemingly naive and light I Was There strikes you as an intruder in the whole, but amid the dirty dub-funk-free-alter-hop I gladly surrender to the lighter grip of a killer-moody breakbeat. The dirty funky extract of the catchy 666 pulls itself out of the whole as a perfectly expected peak of a perfect eight, and after the endless apocalypticism of Satan’s number comes a kaleidoscopic, metallophonized leap into the positivism of annihilation with Positive Energy Death Tunnel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dmAqlNk_aE
With a leap into the wondrous whiteness of crystal-white light and a jazzy, progressive finale, the exceptional third tale of extremely ingenious fractals of sound, content and above all perfect, unbridled music closes into a gorgeous cycle that practically screams for repeats, since after a thousand listens you sense, grope for and taste the sweet details that haven’t hit you yet on the first, second … hundredth spin. Listen To Nebukadnezar is a production-wise ingenious and mature play of all the senses, and the absolutist, totalitarian veil of the perfect psychedelic blend of five young, talented musicians is the noble texture of a record that, decades from now, we’ll justifiably cite as the perfect achievement and pinnacle of local production. No filler here. Everything has sense, oomph and might, which is what everything naturally gravitates toward. Like toward a black hole at the center of the universe, only this time the reason is far happier and less organic, less physical. Nebukadnezar ultimately becomes a state of mind, a meditation, a mantra, a part of a collective dissolving, and in this above-standard transcendental leap into the spheres of perfect Nirvana for all audiophiles, you too, who listened to Nebukadnezar and let it slip under your skin, easily become part of the band. It’s a must for everyone with a gram of taste and aesthetic judgment, and the album at hand sits at the very top (if not already at the very top) of the list of perfect gems of musical creation – and let’s deliberately set aside the home-versus-abroad split this time, because the offering on the table is universal in nature!
Line-up
Miha Blažič-N’Toko – vocals, moog, keyboards, effects
Uroš Weinberger-Wein – guitar
Dejan Slak-Sleyk – bass
David Cvelbar – drums
Miha Šajina-Shekuza – keyboards
Production
Moveknowledgement
Track list
1. Listen To Nebukadnezar
2. Necrodog
3. Scilla And Karibda
4. Chemicals
5. I Am Zorr
6. A Barcode
7. I Was There
8. 666
9. Positive Energy Death Tunnel
