Postmarks
National Parks
POLAND MONOTYPE RECORDS MONO075 CD (2013)
POSTMARKS’s album hums on loud vibrations and mud, as delicate touches on the present
instruments (saxophone/guitar/piano) surge up, erecting a coalescing structure, pauses, ponders, try again to assemble a sound object, to erase it again. That’s when the real piece can unfold : a story told by guitar sizzling, crackling, and a saxophone besides a piano. Electricity talks through the guitar (Martin Siewert, all feedback and vibrations), crackles and hums along the other instruments. Note that the piano always remains crystal-clear in its own voice, while snippets inhabit the place here defined. These places both sound familiar in what they help to depict or evoke, and sound weirdly warped, in a powerful way : feedbacks are mastered, given room to lick the piano/horn jointed discomfort; and it gels : you definitely have to go there ! The instruments (you could just say “piano” but all of them) all really make a point, affirm their existence and will to express what has to be, none
faltering. Ever.
Deceptive short bursts happen & vanish. Campfire music, only indoors.
Weird movie music it is not, even if the musical construction mostly evolves on a marauding atmosphere : space & sound marriage at its best. If these sounds ever were to evoke some specific terrain, the contrasting elements would offer such an adventurous landscape!
Epic, often dramatic, the music hence produced, vertiginously and vigorously, shines a light on successive dynamic phases. Some creamy feedback spill over the horn & string agents, enveloping, scorching. Unnamed sounds emerge and play around the escalating piano, while burning air is expelled from the horn. Some of these places are being played at dusk, at dawn, nevertheless mostly in a highly energetic fashion. Whoops and hisses erupt at the 8th track, the velocity increases, the interventions sound brawny, with electro-guitar lace patterns spreading, retreating, then it all merely stops.