MENSIMONIS - Clone Fever

Drawing on their respective backgrounds as experimentalists, Radbound Mens and Lukas Simonis (also co-founder of Stepmother) merge their surnames into Mensimonis to indulge in improvisation for overdubbed guitars. Their “Clone Fever” contains four oceanic oms, galactic meditations that are sometimes cacophonous, spilling over into industrial rock, and dissonant.

“The Individual Is Handicapped By Coming Face-To-Face With A Conspiracy So Monstrous He Cannot Believe It Exists”, twenty-two minutes long, opens with harmonics, as if the two were just tuning their instruments. By the fourth minute the small saraband has already turned into a raga soaring to cosmic heights, in a subliminal crescendo of microscopic alphabets, yet inexorable, thick with looming tragedy, until it reaches a pinnacle of darting whirlpool.

The sub-frequency gurgle that opens “Few Believe Me When I Tell Them That The Rulers Of This Planet Are Of Reptilian Bloodlines” (eighteen minutes) forcibly dredges up a mantra of dry, jagged phrases, and the hallucination pushes on until it reaches dizziness, an apocalyptic blaze that finally mutates into pure radiation.

“Give The Clone A Soul, God Is Watching Over Your Shoulder”, twenty-two minutes, starting from a clot of tarantella-like chords, becomes the most ambient and contemplative piece, even rarefied into a radio signal amid silence, before reaching a Martian ecstasy. The last track, the shortest both in length (“only” sixteen minutes) and in title, “All Rumours Being Investigated”, is actually the one with the strongest avant-garde conviction, strumming and an electronic chirring that stir the waves until they trigger a tidal wave of harmony.

It does have some limits: the tracks resemble one another in tonality, form and outcome, and here and there you can feel the absence of a hypnotic vocalist (as in Charalambides) or of a rhythm section (as in Hash Jar Tempo), but not everyone is capable of organizing such breadth – combining rationality and irrationality – and making it feel boundless, while at the same time giving it real firepower. Deeply fascinating, it often leaves you breathless, even just reading the track titles one after another.

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13/03/2017