SLON – nachtnebel / nachtnebel’s revenge
(7”, valeot)
Late autumn, early winter in the hills of eastern
styria fog at dawn and during the night (translated: nachtnebel) is a big
issue. Sometimes the fog lasts for the whole night and well into the the
next morning until noon. It covers the world in a light-muffling grey that
also seems to swallow sounds and life somehow comes to a halt. It is
troublesome for traffic and because deer are moving onto the streets, then
stand still transfixed by the oncoming lights and being run over by cars,
trucks and treckers. Looking out the window and seeing nothing but grey also
stifles any kind of will to produce and progress, but makes me retire to my
couch and curl up with a good read and a warm drink, trying to ignore the
sogging wetness of outside slowly creeping in.
Despite all the technology and electronics available in
a regular household our lives are still governed by the seaonal changes and
the impact of the weather much more than we like to admit to ourselves. Yes,
we may buy a jacket made of nano-technology with water-resistant fabric that
also keeps us warm with special thermo-fibres, but that doesn’t give us
the hearty emotion a warm summer day is able to give us. And we will know
this when the wet cold inspite of our 350 € super-jacket crawls up inside
our pants and takes a hard grip on our bones. The kind of cold that makes
you shiver when thinking about homeless people looking for cover somewhere
in the concrete corners of this city, or how the cold still takes away the
old and sick from their beds. Try as hard as we might, there is no way to
finally ignore nature in our lives.
I have no idea how all of this fits to the two new
songs by Austrian post-rock instrumental quartet Slon, but both sides of this seven inch are
drenched with a driving beauty that at first speeds up and fills the room,
then is taken back to wallow in its own dynamic only to re-coup the energy
of the first part with even more fervour. The guitars play different kinds
of harmonies over the general chords and that makes for a very impressive
and impactful layer of beauty. Especially when one guitar plucks
“angelic” high notes that recede in the back but add so much to enrich
the song. In comparison to their album “antenna” (also on valeot) there
is more power and aggression in these songs, the electronics have (almost?)
been brushed out, but they have also not forgotten about the small details
that are so important.
