MICEVICE - Experiments On The Duration Of Love (ristampa)

This is a strange story. A story that comes from far away, in terms of both time and space. Straight from Australia, ten years ago. That's when Giovanni Ferrario put together this creature called Micevice, which featured Cat Hope on bass and Marta Collica on vocals. The album was recorded between Catania and Melbourne by Norman Fagg (sound engineer for Dirty Three) and produced by Hugo Race. With this reissue, My Honey Records gives us the chance to talk about it again, to get to know it anew, shining a light back on a work that moved under the radar when the twentieth century was settling into a not-too-sad sunset.

The eleven tracks are rare pearls, a cloud of warm smoke that sinuously envelops anyone who gives themselves over to it. Sounds crafted with obsessive perfection for an album built on atmosphere. A record of rarefied folk-rock, for suffering souls, starting with the opener "True" and the following "Degenerate Me". It's like being seduced by a temptation subtly whispered by a voice that reigns like the noblest of instruments. It only takes a handful of tracks for us to find ourselves prisoners of a spell impossible to break; we could follow the flute of "Sun", fully immersed in a parallel dimension that has sinuously taken hold of us and of our perception of the world around us. A seduction that doesn't shy away from getting bolder, with the rock veins and disillusioned romanticism of "Queue For Sedatives" and "Silver Coat", incursions into the bare, nocturnal territories belonging to the shaman Nick Cave, a constant presence and recurring echo heard in the distance.

In the claustrophobic "The Velvet Palace" it's the bass that marks the rhythm of a compressed heart, and in "Ridge" and "Red Fish" things edge a little closer to Portishead territory. The feeling is that of a portentous magic ritual to be entered into with every part of yourself, to fully take part in, where each song sets off on a journey of its own, a unique and peculiar path, like nothing and no one else, arriving at a desert expanse where you can let go completely. The structure rests on finely crafted melodies, on guitars that are the key to opening every door in front of us, whether they call for tenderness or creeping aggression, and on a remarkable richness of sound for a work that sounds essentially simple and fresh, never redundant, like the result of an impulsive, natural creative flow that only needs to be captured, rarely reworked.

"Experiments On The Duration Of Love" still manages to sound current today - in fact, it's rediscovered as a forerunner of the recent indie wave - but perhaps rich with a capacity to captivate and touch deep chords that has been lost in these years. And perhaps it's precisely here, in what is probably this album's finest quality, that you notice the years it carries with it.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

19/11/2008