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***"Larsen's ideology seems to be arcane and extreme (though I'm not clear on all the details), and from what I could glean when I recorded their album in their hometown Torino, Italy, they operate as some sort of hermetic cult / collective. Protective of their personal identities, out of legal necessity as well as a firmly held belief in the superfluity of their own names and faces to the agenda of their work, they recorded Rever from behind a screen and communicated with me via assistants and translators exclusively. "We worked as if executing a field recording. The band would play a piece, sometimes for hours, over and over until they felt they'd reached the correct level of concentration, at which time they directed me to record. I had the sense of eavesdropping on a private ceremony. I sat in the control booth for hours, watching the shadows move behind the screen with no "music" being generated at all - just the kind of highly ritualized sounds I recognized from the initial CDRs they'd sent me. Heated, violent arguments - shouting matches, really - would lead seamlessly into a soft and beautiful groove, or just as likely, a martial stomp, or a miasma of dissonant electric atmospheres. My role as producer was simply to capture these moments on tape. We worked later on the editing of this material (some ten hours of original recordings, as I recall) with the band standing behind the screen conferring, shouting, arguing, laughing, or simply directing me and the engineer (all in indecipherable Italian, sporadically translated). "With electric guitars, accordion, organ, bass guitar, drums and percussion, their voices, a trumpet or trombone, and an occasional handmade tape loop, Larsen work and work themselves into the core of the rhythm and sounds they generate. Grooves begin with a certain feel and transmute entirely by the time they wring the essence into its final shape, which is what you hear, in edited form, on Rever. That's why I say they're like field recordings - excerpts from an ongoing rite, documented by a non-invasive stranger." --M. Gira, Young God Records - Ritualized dissonant groove-stomp "field recording" documented by non-invasive stranger M. Gira (Swans / Angels of Light)
- The Young God label continues its devotion to Europe's most interesting bands with this debut release from Italy's Larsen
- Released by Gira's highly visible Young God Records, featured on label's much hit site, www.younggodrecords.com
30-second RealAudio excerpts: Impro #2
Radial
Mentre
Finger Number Six
Intermezzo
Akin
Intro
Maya
Impro #1 If you have a recent version of iTunes software on your computer, clicking on the link below should open the iTunes application and take you to the iTunes Music Service page-- where you can listen to samples and buy this album, or individual tracks: Larsen "Rever" (Young God) For a complete listing of Midheaven exclusive albums available for download from the iTunes Music service, please visit the Midheaven Mailorder/Revolver USA Downloadables page. |
