MANINKARI
– le diable avec ses chevaux
(2CD,
Conspiracy)
After setting the expectations really high with their
first epic and enormous EP “psychoide / participation mystic” the brothers
Charlot don’t let down, nay, even ante up on the first taste. “Le Diable
avec ses Chevaux” (“the devil with his hair” transl.) is two
full hours of epic, mystic magic. Music that is made of classical
instruments together with electronics, percussions and keyboards. But more
importantly music that is gripping, exciting, dark and enigmatic, and that
stands like a beacon of seriousness and effect, of originality and
uniqueness of vision, in a sea of multitudes of meaningless and useless
bands and projects that all sound the same. This music is like a dark and
wild forest filled with enchanted and evil spirits, whose noises are
haunting and frightening. Like back in the time before the globalisation was
over, when there were still adventures to be had and evil powers of nature
to be faught. When live happened in the real world and where mystical things
and ideas lived right around the corner, and not inside a computer network
transported by a cathode-ray monitor.
Sometimes I think I live in the wrong time. If I look
at people working at their computers (such as I am now) I see their faces
strained, their backs bent, their heads tilted forward, their eyes and faces
grim and serious and frustrated and not at all happy. Oh, how much better
must it have been back a few hundred years ago, when live was still hands
on, real in every aspect, dangerous and dirty and evil and painful. A time
when medics still believed that the well being of a person is dictated by
the balance of four body fluids and where nobody had yet heard of viruses
(real ones not computer ones), bacteriae or even electricity. Where alchemy
was still an option to get rich and not the Eurolottery promise or the next
internet bubble. Aw, probably it is just the hunch, that Maninkari is the
perfect music to read novels that are older than a hundred years by. Like
Joris-Karl Huysman’s “Les Bas” or some of the more sombre works of
Fjodor Dostojewski.
Maninkari are also prove that size does matter. Big and
enormous size, or, to speak in more musical terms, length of time. Over the
course of longish drones bridges and buildings of melodies span, that evolve
slowly, grow more and more dense and culminate in a highpoint of noisy,
screaming instruments used to their maximum. Inbetween a lost and forgotten
piano lures the listener as if its sounds are projected through time (“Un
Malaise d’Ivresse”), or humble and innocent sounds traject themselves
onto a larger scale and give birth to yet another fascinating mountain of
music. Unidentifiable, like the cover picture.
It is more than daring to release such a music, that
does not sit anywhere inside a genre, that is neither classical nor heavy,
that asks a lot more from its listeners as the booming drones of Sunn0))) or
Earth will ever do, that has more substance and more variety inside a single
drone than the whole oeuvre of Boris in all, and that is almost theatrical in
its dramatic intention, and least of all ambience. How does it fit into a
listener’s menue for a day? How does it fit into the streamlined release
schedule of a modern indie-label with all their marketing ploys and plans?
How will the metal boys react that buy a drone-album every other month to
sit beside their millions of black-metal CDs that basically all sound the
same? There are no refrains on here, no directly accessible layers of
sounds. Sometimes the violins scratch like a beginner was getting his first
rounds, the drums go into a jazzy field mode and other sounds crash onto
themselves like somebody collapsed over the sound-switchboard. Those metal
boys are a conservative pack, they actually don’t like to be challenged.
