Al Karpenter/Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante — The Forthcoming/S-T (Ever Never)
The Forthcoming by Al Karpenter
Al Karpenter swamps threads of song in seething banks of noise and dissonance. You find yourself focusing on blaring surface noise, while sense and melody percolates somewhere underneath. It is very modern in that there is too much going on and you are always distracted, always struggling to find the point, but you know it’s there. If it doesn’t make sense that’s on you.
This pair of releases allows for fervid collaboration, across and within the noise experimental genre. The Forthcoming supplements the Spanish outfit’s live line-up—Álvaro Matilla, Mattin, Marta Sainz and Enrique Zaccagnini—with like minded samplers, warpers and droners: Sunik Kim, Dominic Coles and Triple Negative. The self-titled brings in medieval futurists of CIA Debutante, just off their Siltbreeze outing Willow, Down, reviewed here a month or so ago (“The sound is immersive and disturbing, noises like factory equipment clashing with eerie Suicide-like beats.”). You can’t really call one disc a solo album and the other a joint effort since both gain intrigue and unpredictability from outside influences.
But let’s do it anyway The Al Karpenter disc dissolves and reforms across six tracks, now muttering imprecations over inchoate punk noise (“The Forthcoming”), now approaching bass thumping electro-dance clarity (“A Brand New Brontophobia”), now disintegrating into incantatory chaos (“Poison Sun”), depending on who is involved. The title track, aided by London’s Triple Negative, launches florid arias out of a chaotic mesh of guitars and drums, where the instruments natter on towards their own ends, unconnected by time signature or key. A shimmery, shoegaze-y instrumental break tips into lyricism but slides out of true, an antic beat erupting from it like an irregular heart in flight. Contrast that with the clean, driving agitation of “A Brand New Brontophobia,” where Sunik Kim guests. A jittering, techno bass rumbles, clipped onslaughts of snare-like drum machines rattle, as Mattin murmurs and croons. “Happy B-Day,” one of the cuts with Dominic Coles, opens giddily with keyboard before cutting all the way back to guitar notes and murmured threat (“I’m not afraid to kill or die”), alternately minimal and maximal. “Drood (Can You Hear Me Now?)” offers the clearest distillation of Al Karpenter’s haunted eclecticism, layering vertiginous synths over muttered alienation.
S/T by Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante
The album with CIA Debutante also delivers dystopic poetry but couched more rhythmically and with the agitation of punk rock. “Born Dead” lumbers like a giant mechanical beast, its beat slow and inexorable, giving shape to masses of guitar feedback and intermittent shouts of the title. “Public Scaffolding” bangs more frantically, as a voice rages against income inequality. It slips into static but doesn’t lose its structure; you can hear the toms rattling all the way through. “Medieval Cocaine” sounds the most purely CIA Debutante-ish of all these tracks, the ping and squiggle of electronics framing unknowable, evocative verses. “Fuck You All to Fade No More,” dances inscrutably on synth rhythms and shattering machine beats, as the lyrics shatter the f-word into fragments, repeatedly.
None of this is especially easy listening, and you won’t be putting it on at your next dinner party. But it is full of layers and passionate inquiry, and the chaos is like the world right now. Listen and feel the ground under you crumble and everything sure come into doubt.
First radio single from JMMR’s For The Record (Billy Blue Records) available Feb. 1
First radio single from JMMR’s For The Record (Billy Blue Records) available Feb. 1
Billy Blue Records is pleased to announce the February 1st release of “The Guitar Song,” the first radio single from For The Record, the forthcoming, 12-song album from Joe Mullins & The Radio Ramblers.
A duet between band leader Joe Mullins and legendary Grand Ole Opry member, Del McCoury, “The Guitar Song” was co-written by another legend, Country Music Hall of Fame member, Bill Anderson,…
