Date: 22.12.2017
Location: Cerkno / C.M.A.K. / Slovenia
Mart are an all-instrumental band from Ajdovščina, a quartet to be exact. Before the year ran out, they stopped by the C.M.A.K. club in Cerkno too. Even though the clock had well and truly struck past half nine in the evening, the club was showing precious few signs of life at that hour. Sure, everything was set up on stage for a proper gig bash. Blink twice and an hour later it was a completely different picture. The band had arrived at the venue, people had shown up, and the vibe, the atmosphere, was suddenly just right, exactly what you want and, let’s be honest, what you expect.
Not much has been said about Mart so far, and even less written, even though the band put out their studio debut “Paralele” back in 2008 and have been going since 2005. This is a crew developing their own sound and style. They’re a homegrown band that writes and creates strictly original music. The quartet, made up of keyboards, guitar, bass guitar and drums, opened with a “almost over-the-top lively” set, even a bit mischievously rowdy. They were in good energetic hands, brimming with joy and optimism, and with the crowd’s heartfelt support the gig grew along with them.
The sound was excellent, with all four building blocks that shaped it sitting in an even balance and contrast. Musically, Mart are a pretty interesting act for the Slovenian scene, but they’re still seriously developing and polishing their artistry, or musical portfolio. Judging by what we heard at C.M.A.K., there’s a whole heap of development options open for the future. So? The new album needs to come together, that’s a must! Given that this is an instrumental band, Mart compose their music so that it always keeps a high level of musical accessibility. Even in moments when the keyboards take the initiative, dominating the quartet’s vocabulary and even taking the lead from the guitar, Mart hold on to the red thread of a sturdy motif-based format and never fall apart into the musical “weirdness” that popular experimenting can bring. So they allow themselves a bit of “musical comfort”. The band likes to stick with a given motif, run through a lived-in jam, with plenty of repetitions on it, which is why Mart come across as cerebral, hypnotic.
What’s interesting is that the gig grew steadily in quality. Minute by minute, right up to the final emotional crescendo at the very end of a set that lasted a good hour. The start brought a feeling of wavering and mild uncertainty about the guys’ skills, but that turned out to be misleading as things went on. There was also a lot of talking between songs, too much chatter, but that actually reflected just the opposite. An almost excessive looseness in the band, which around the middle of the gig completely convinced us that this is a quartet of finely honed musicians who read each other superbly, know exactly what they want to stress during the set, and can back it up with the chemistry they build, or rather establish, on stage. Along with it comes an atmosphere that can lure the listener into a state of cerebral rapture, beyond the real and the empirical, that is, the binary world.
Although we can say Mart are lighter-weight instrumental prog, their musical portfolio has a post-rock element woven in, one that isn’t propped up by affected, programmed “grimacing” through all kinds of synthesizing sonic pranks. So Mart sound very elementary. No extra stage clutter of programmed kitsch and frills. With more commitment and some self-challenging of ideas, which always leads to a useful opening of new evolutionary horizons, the band could in the future reach a musical format of expressive interest like the one typical of, say, Finland’s Hydria Spacefolk. So let’s wait for the new studio album.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
