Bark Haze (Thurston Moore & Gown)/Traum (Lambsbread/Graveyards)

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Customer reviews
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4...according to our Brett on Fri 20 Feb, 2009.

This new series on Music Fellowship is cool as fudge. For a start they've all got big fudge-off planets on one side of their picture discs and watercolor-y pictures from 2001 on the other (the film I mean, there aren't any pictures of Jimmy Eat World or anything). Some of my friends and I went to see 2001 in 70mm Cinerama last year and it was 'itchin, apart from the audience who were prissy as fudge and the interview afterwards with Stanley Kubrick's brother-in-law who, it quickly became obvious, knew next to nothing of interest about him or the film. Anyway, these things feature two bands each with each taking up a channel on the vinyl so you can Matt le Tiss around with your amp knobs to choose how much they merge with each other. Clever mitt, eh? It also comes with a CD featuring each component on its own, mixed in stereo, as well as a combined track. Monolith:Jupiter's got Gown (Thurston Moore and Gown) and Traum (Lambsbread and Graveyards) noodling about on it. Put 'em both together and you've got noodling with twice the intestity. It's all scraping strings, detuned guitars, wrung-out harmonics and the like. It sounds a bit like No Neck Blues Band at their most formless, trying to have an instrument fight in Japan while so smacked-out they can hardly move. It takes off a bit towards the end, like. It's alright, but it's not really a patch on the Windy & Carl/Heavy Winged effort which owns like a motherlover.

After Dave shuts down HAL and finds the true objective of their mission to Jupiter, he boards a pod and descends towards a monolith in search of the destination of the transmission mankind discovered on the Moon. As he reaches the Jupiter monolith, he begins to travel through a tunnel of lights, projected through space and time until he ends up in an ornately decorated bedroom with Renaissance artwork and molding. In the bedroom, Dave starts to rapidly age. As he lies in his deathbed another monolith appears. Just as the apes did in the opening sequence, he reaches out to it, echoing Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, and is evolved; the starchild is born. The Monolith series combines two like-minded artists on the same one-sided, reverse-cut LP by hard-panning one recording to the right and the other recording to the left. By adjusting the panning controls on his or her turntable, the listener is free to control the degree to which the two recordings melt into one. Each edition in the series is limited to a one-time pressing of 500 picture disc LPs featuring a Monolith inspired painting by Ned Clayton and includes a CD with individual songs and stereo mixes. Monolith: Jupiter is realized by two fre(e/ak)-jazz duos: Traum and Bark Haze. On the right is Bark Haze, the duo of Gown (Andrew MacGregor) and Thurston Moore. Bark Haze explores the interplay between two unbridled electric guitars. This recording focuses on restraint: an intimate melding of the minds through careful abuse of the strings. On the left is Traum, in this recording the duo of Hell Hall (Graveyards) and Zac Davis (Lambsbread). The project is Hall's continuation of Graveyards' from the gutter ode to jazz's influence on noise. This recording combines Hall's creative and controlled drumwork and percussion with Davis' schizophrenic/ADHD guitar hallucinations.

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