MAJMOON / PEACH PIT – split CD
(CD – guranjeslitice)
For the whole day my right eye
had been hurting. Scratching as if something sharp had been caught in it.
The eye watered, my eyesight blurred and it constantly led my concentration
back to it, scratching until it was swollen and red. And nothing helped. So
I thought I put in this record, to soothe a little. Didn’t help a thing.
So I got up and tried to wash it out once more. The hurting itch got better
as long as I kept my under the running tap. But as soon as I got it out, the
scratching commenced. Hell, can you believe this? Such a little thing and
able to drive you crazy in not even one hour. Until I wanted to take
something edgy and just drive it into my eye to scratch out whatever it is
that keeps on annoying, distracting and hurting me.
The music of Majmoon on the
other hand really is soothing. Slowly unfolding, instrumental tracks
somewhere in the wide area between ambient and post rock, that grow
dynamically, even if sometimes not very much. But they don’t need to. Set
in their own time of evolvement and growth, they are mostly like life being
gentle and easy, somewhere close to a softly moving sea. Drums, bass,
guitars, with the odd glass chimes or other keyboards and a trumpet in the
arrangement. Maybe it is all surface, who knows, but just staring at the
surface for a while can also give you the wonderful ease of a mind wandering
aimlessly and opening up for all things possible. Don’t mistake with easy
listening, though, which is made to lull you in and guide you away from
becoming yourself. Majmoon in more than one way reminds me of those old Gary
Burton albums on ECM. You cannot really call it polished and mean it
negatively, if the whole world will mirror in it.
Peach Pit go about things
quite contrarily. They are also an instrumental quartet but they play in the
wide area between postrock and noiserock with electronic specks of weirdness
in the mix. They call it sportrock, maybe because it is like sports to them.
Would depend on how they play it live. On record it sounds driven,
energetic, ecstatic and a little crazy. Great stuff, to be precise.
Sometimes they tend to do a little too much of frickling and play “too
many notes” (to quote somebody famous) but they usually break it up with
some noisy weirdness – and more notes. Instead of just going
bam!-bam!-bam! on your brain like so many other hard and heavy bands, they
like to go bam!-bam!-bam! but give you something multilayered and
technically highstanding to listen to at the same time.
Finally, after rinsing for a
while and turning my eye around this way and that, I located it. Something
tiny and black stuck to inside of my upper eyelid. I had to pull my head
back all the way and lift my upper eyelid about one centimeter to see it. So
I grabbed a paper tissue, wet one side and with one gentle swish fished it
out. Much better. It is the simple things in life that drive you crazy and
also those simple things that make you realize how wonderful and good things
are.
