SLOWCREAM – wax on wool
(CD – nonine)
With “wax on wool” Slowcream aka
Me Rabenstein and his label Nonine step into another dimension of music. Or
rather out of the singular dimension they inhabited beforehand. No more of
the one-dimensional beat cluttering and synth-layering of dark, post-urban
electronic beats that swamp the internet like a virus. “Wax on wool” is
a collection of stark, edgy tracks that form soundscapes of sombre
destruction and nightly devastation. The post-urban wasteland feeling
remains the same, but there is more of modern composition in the music now
than ever before. A vast step, actually, fascinatingly executed and growing
with each listen.
I wonder where this kind of
experimentalism comes from? Usually, electronic beat producers aren’t very
prone to experimentalism or progressiveness, even if they like to display
the posture of innovation by sporting Apple accesoires. With this album
Rabenstein moves far away from that. Instead of taking the listener through
a variety of more or less elegantly mixed and built tracks, he prefers to
introduce a more complex and intricate structure to the whole album, where
various parts refer to each other are spread over the whole record.
Musically the most speaking
features are real upright bass lines that invade the electronic clutters of
sounds and sparks of noises to add a cool noir feeling to the already
freezing music. As on the track “mild mountains”, which induces pictures
of lost highways and cold havens right from the beginning. This track also
features the second big change: a vocalist called Major Major speaking
lyrics by Rabenstein over the music. His tonality reminds me of the
introductory speaker of Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s epic debut, but what
he offers is completely different. On this track he starts with “Meg Ryan
called me last night, she said my voice is cute, I am in the mood for
love”. What do you think of that, now, little prince? Moreover, the
intonation of Major Major makes even otherwisely daft lyrics like “I love
to love you” sound tragic, dangerous and distorting.
Is it really humor when the
vocalist on the track “into butter” exchanges the line of the first
verse “Last night my friend saved my life” with the line “last night
my friend shaved my wife” in the second? Going on “he shaved her good,
with his knife” and then finally to “last night my friend fucked my
life, he killed my wife, with his knife” in the third and final verse.
Hard to say, but it would be a queer sense of humour. Listen to the song to
find out how the story ends. The unsurprising end is matched with an equally
unsuprising rhyme, but in this concoction it sounds outright funny. In a
queer sense of the word, mind you.
During all of this Rabenstein
also seems to suit his fancy for weird instruments or at least soundbanks,
introducing chimes and synths that sound as if they were taken straight from
the soundtracks of mid-Eighties action movies (“Streets of Thunder” type
movies) and places them squarely on top of his tracks, where after some time
they start to make sense. Then there is a little sound in the back of
“wanderlust” that reminds me of the meowing of a little cat being
tortured. I hope it is something else. Then there are deep bass lines and
vocal samples from old movies and a load of other interesting things.
