PEEESSEYE - Mayhem In The Mansion, Shivers In The Shack

From improvisation to grindcore, and from there to free-folk, only to become improvisation once again.

Peeesseye are soul thieves, authors of a music so contaminated that it becomes the perfect distillate of fantasies too forbidden to sound ordinary, beyond genre and expectation, even beyond comprehension—like a pagan rite performed in the garden, one best kept away from. Because this is truly “damage in the villas and shivers in the shacks.”

It began as a minimal form of radical improvisation, made of tears, regurgitations and screeches, so “poor” that it had to define itself in the interstices with silence, the infinite white canvas on which to paint rough splashes of noise-black. Then they realized the improv scene was too self-referential, and disguised themselves with the most abject traits of metal aesthetics, only to shuffle the deck again and invent a form of esoteric-folk not so far from masters like Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, yet of clear impro derivation.

A monolithic record, “Commuting Between The Surface And The Underground,” so much so that the new album seems like its evaporation.

The sound thins out, fragments and grows dense with detail until it becomes as unstable and nervous as it was in the early days. So “Revival” is Spanish-tinged epos as Jackie O-Motherfucker might play it, but putting together banal, psychedelic free-folk is simply not in the nature of a band of true “musicians,” and indeed “Moon Vegetables,” listened to closely, already reveals the differences. Chris Forsyth's acoustic guitar hints at folk-blues moves and strumming, while Fritz Welch on drums shows such awareness of the ritual nature of certain sounds that comparisons to Charles Gocher of Sun City Girls and the Charles Hayward who looked to the Far East feel warranted. His instrumental ability has no equal within the weird-folk carnival of random bell-ringing and dim-witted percussion. His nervous mumbling carries grind memories with it, turning into an impious and disturbing prayer, while Jaime Fennelly, on synth and harmonium, at times creates celestial carpets, at other times sonic scribbles, and elsewhere dense masses of electronic sound that come and go, fall into the void and flare up again suddenly, as happens in “Plastic Grass,” a bloody clot of poorly vented anxiety and induced anguish.

The title track is then a slow crescendo of choral austerity and ceremonial slide-guitar, with Welch's drumsticks never so close to free-jazz figures, while his bass drum in “Night Flowering Artery” is a volley of fireworks, officiating yet another insane cult of perdition, with shards and glasses thrown to the floor as a backdrop. And with “Riding On The Curly Head Of A Man From Coney Island In A 280ZX” comes the release, in the form of a duet of ashen-gray emulsions from Forsyth and Fennelly, until a frenzied Welch bursts in to create chaos and uproar (and here the band really does sound like a dark-futuristic version of Sun City Girls, or a free-folk version of AMM). The chaos advances for several minutes until everything recomposes itself into the ballad—nocturnal and restless as never before—of “(Zoltan Is) My New Bird,” a ritual exercise in anguished restraint.

If you can't find your nightmares anymore, start looking for them here.

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17/11/2007