MONNO - ghosts
(CD/LP – conspiracy)
A new record by Monno is
always a tectonic event in the world of avant rock. And like all tectonic
movements you can only judge them by the rifts and clifts they leave open
after some time, but it is almost impossible to judge them as they work and
even more to predict them. Monno – not to be mistaken with the japanese
soft-flow instrumental group Mono – have left their marks on many music
fanatics skin by being unpredictable, consequential and without compromise.
Their third album “ghosts” leads them deeply into doom-impending, dark
landscapes. Gone are the weirdness and asylum-like noise erruptions and
sound collages of “Candlelight
Technology” and the live destruction brutality of “errors”. This
record has five big tracks of structured and dark heaviness, grinding slowly
at your backbone and skull. Yes, that great. Deep in the territory of
Sunn0))) and other booming doom adepts with low hanging basses, Monno carve
out their special niche by forging a soundtrack that spells impending doom
better than most others. Especially the opener “negative horizon” shows
where this big ship is headed.
Anyway, Monno know much better
than to just emulate a formula that becomes bland and trite with the third
copy even by the artists who originally started the whole thing. Like so
many of those boring CDs produced to be desserts to a solid black metal
menue. (Very much like chill out ambient was meant to be consumed after a
night of high speed trance rave, and both equally boring until Mego came
along to soup them up.) So, to escape the monotony, Monno build original
effects into their compositions, some little, some bigger. The
aforementioned opener “negative horizon” will be one of the few slowly
pounding doom-ambient tracks you’ll ever hear that has a break. And I mean
a musical break, that stops the music on will with a certain fill, usually
percussive, and then takes the song into another direction, before it is
back to more of the same delight. There are brutally distorted black metal
vocals on “Troye” that equal an avalanche of noise coming down over the
rest of the music. (Don’t ask about lyrics, though.) Another track,
“Hull”, works itself into a fast noise-frenzy of uncontrolled feedback
bursts and white noise power erruptions. More like hull breakage than
containment, but very forcefull and exciting. There aren’t many things
that fit so well together as bass and noise.
Or the overall structure of
the songs: The record starts off slowly, then gets faster, turns into a
beast of noise and then returns to slower yet equally dark waters. There are
only few artists and bands able to make a whole album of this kind of sludge
listenable, in the sense of really sitting down to listen to it. Ulver,
Bohren and the Club of Gore, some in this vein of Boris, Earth, the aforementioned and in this
ressort inevitable Sunn0))), are amongst them. A lot of the others are also
great to listen to while doing something else, like reading, surfing the
internet, playing a round of Wolfenstein or flogging your special someone.
But this one is really listenable in the real sense of the word, mainly
because of the – now take this – variety of the songs. They are all
heavy, evil and bass-ridden, true, but they make for something special each
time.
