OLDMAN – two heads bis bis
(CD – Low Impedance)
A grumbling bass beat haunts a
snarly drum in a cold, dark night through woods in which ghostly creatures
howl to the sound of a rust steel stringed guitar. If these are instrumental
fairy tales, then they are not for the lighthearted, rather than that they
tell of the oldest truths of mankind. Like real folktales from Stagger Lee
to the Knoxville Girl and Black Betty there is an eerie underground of
profound truths and wisdom runnning through these tracks, yet they are
instrumentals and apart from some huffing, gruffing and grumbling in the
back there is no vocals on “two heads bis bis”. All the while the bass
beat stays the same, the drums to little else than what they have been doing
all along, but the noises, sounds and atmospheres around the basic backbone
of rockmusic are changing to a more and more scary dreamscape. And that is
only the first of six tracks on this remarkable album.
Charles Eric Charrier aka
Oldman delves into a unique mixture of folk/rock and jazz/noise/avantgarde
to get down to the real core of the northwestern trail music. A lot of it is
avantgarde music with a twisted sense of humour, the kind that never shows
it is meant as humour and half of the time isn’t, but you are always
losing on the guess as to which half you are watching right now.
Janus-headed music with distorting intentions and a
sedate-radiate-manipulate strategy. Just listen to the strangely bending
bottleneck guitar on the aptly titled "ghosts". Charrier takes you
from a rather straight line of music into a victorian nightmare kind of dark
dreamworld without blinking an eye. He takes the basic rock-backbone of
guitar, bass and drums and then either distorts everything around it or he
distorts the basic foundation itself, or he distorts both. Anything that
sounds okay and nice at the beginning eventually, rather sooner than later,
turns out as discomforting, dark and with a hidden secret. Like good folk
tales, by the way.
There is nothing you can be
sure about with Oldman, but he will keep on rumbling in different
directions. Repeating loops of music slowly turn into weirder and scarier
soundscapes. I start to wonder if it is me or the music that seems to be
getting dark feelings here. I mean, I wonder if it is really the music or a
projection of my inner state of mind that produces these reactions of mine.
Probably a mixture of both, and probably we won’t be able to judge
completely, for this seems to me like a basic dilemma of music reception and
probably also a good number of scholars have gritted their teeth on this
one. But what is there are tribal percussions mixed with eerie sounds and
strange samples and things that can not be attributed for real. I think this
would be a nice soundtrack to a HP Lovecraft reading session. Both produce a
feeeling of uneasiness and shivering fear without ever getting really
concrete or directly to the point. Nevertheless, the effect is much more
remarkable and sustainable than with the direct horror-shows of e.g.
Entombed and Stephen King.
