PSYCHON – slow country for old men
(limited CD/ download, narrominded)
The title’s wordplay with
Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel (and the no less bleak and often
misunderstood movie based on the same novel) is a misleading conjecture to
Psychon’s music. Also the various close ups of a man’s body – throat
on the front cover, backside shoulder on the back, hairy parts on the inside
– with all their hyperrealist focus on all the minor malformities usually
photoshopped out of any designed fotography, is misleading. Because “slow
country for old men” is neither bleak and without morals and leading to
destruction nor is it based on bringing the inadequacies and ugliness of
electronic miniscules to the surface. Yes, very much like their first album
“apocalypse has been
dubbed the weekend pill” their music is enigmatic and
unpredictable, but it is also refined and well composed.
Over the course of five years,
in which “psychon was the last thing on our minds” (from the insert
text), the trio of Lars Meijer, Coen Oscar Polack and Jantijn Prins has
recorded, re-recorded, spliced, tweaked and re-arranged this collection of
ten tracks the way they saw fit and with whathever was on their mind. No
matter how strange they go, and there is some weird shit on here for sure,
they seem always to return to beat-oriented, well-versed electronic coffee
house funk and a warm kind of organic electronica based on metric
structures. In between though there are field recordings, vocal samples, a
saxophone exploring the outer skirts of its reaches as well as hip hop
beats, scraped guitar strings or minimal noise.
The whatever comes to their
minds approach never gets the upper hand, though, because balance and
arrangement is still a main focus. Even when an acoustic guitar line follows
right after a heavily spliced and looped vocal sample or a heavy funk basis
is constrasted with some heavy breathing experiments and a strange sample
saying “Dutch” over the crash cymbal only to incorporate an old eighties
sax-line and sample in some way you only realize after several listenings
that this thing here actually refers to something you heard a thousand times
when you were a teenager. And then you still can’t remember what it is.
There is nothing you could really compare Psychon to.
Who could ever get to the
bottom of what all of this really means? Someday music archaeologists
probably will look back and pronounce this the most important experimental
album of the decade. Well, maybe it will be just some music blog that puts
up illegal mp3 downloads and has 50 devoted readers worldwide. Either way, I
am sure that “slow country for old men” will leave some impact on this
world. Oh yeah, and if anything, the title refers to how the trio feels in
their homebase and nothing else. And in this respect this may be a soothing
thought.
