Another great one from Matt Weston. I’ve given up trying to account for the achievements of this American solo player – too often I have used the word “maverick” to describe him, when by now he’s starting to assume the appearance of the boss of all steers and feral bulls in a cosmic ranch the size of planet Jupiter. And he’s also chief cattleman of the resplendent ranch house too. I’ve also given up listing his methods and techniques, but percussion, tape manipulation, electronics and graphic scores are among his weaponry heaped up like slices of Battenberg cake on the trolley.
Embrace This Twilight (7272MUSIC #015) might be slightly less aggressive than previous outbursts we’ve heard from this maestro, and certainly ‘The Drunken Dance with the Telegrapher’ is a studied exercise in restraint and ambiguity, wrought I think with strange electronic hammers and tortured howling voices, and conveying a desolate survey of the state of the modern world – not just grim urban scapes, but moral and political ruin, and other signs of decay seeping into the horizon. What an evocative track title too – Captain Beefheart is tipping his fur-coated top hat from his own corner of heaven reserved for surreal poets. If there is indeed a telegraph operator buried here in Weston’s skewed universe, his messages are being scrambled and the transmission is wrecked by unknown enemies. Few creators have succeeded in condensing this much sheer alienation into sound, while still sublimating it into art that has its own rugged beauty.
Back onto slightly more familiar turf with ‘The Sky Over Petrograd’, which one might superficially tag as “electronics + percussion”, but the two elements are pulling in opposite directions and fighting their own battle inside your skull. Great showcase for Weston’s superlative drumming – he wrong-foots your brain every half-second with these eccentric patterns, building on lessons learned from free jazz as well as avant-garde composition. I’d like to think Weston is capable of remaking certain contemporary genres in his own manner – if so ‘Petrograd’ is a forceful riposte to much insipid music in the art-Techno mould. For sheer nightmare and paranoiac excess (the latter a hallmark of this Tarfumes Man) turn ye to ‘Halfway To Smearing’, an exercise in tape collage, sampled voices, percussion and electronics that is guaranteed to induce instant despair. Two or more voices are locked in a sterile debate, perhaps about scientific matters or politics, but words are reduced to gibberish until they become abstract patterns on cloth, stripped of meaning, while around us a sinister melange of harshness stings like 18 nettle beds. Required listening if you want a bracing alternative take on any given form of modern discourse, including the seething toxic beds of social media.
Four sides, four “songs” as he calls them, even though not a single singing voice is embedded in the grooves – and we end with ‘Every Day You Will See The Dust’. For some reason at this point I got the idea that the entire double LP could be read as an inverted, satirical take on the American national anthem – “twilight’s last gleaming” and all that – but that’s probably just me reading too much into it. On the other hand, if T.S. Eliot could find “fear in a handful of dust”, then this final 15:04 minute doomster is a trudge into the very heart of darkness…ominous, terror-filled, you bet…but once again a showcase for Weston’s compositional skills, with its bold shifts in dynamics, and iron control over a number of powerful sonic elements so strong that they could easily overwhelm us, if let loose. Far from ending the album on a high note, we are plunged even deeper into the ocean of despair with these keening, wretched sounds, and yet a great catharsis is achieved through the sublimation of noise and pain. Weston continues to plough his own grain-silo and occupy his own unique diamond mine…more power to his tractor…from 28 June 2023.
Update 07/02/2025: Weston informs me that ‘Every Day You Will See The Dust’ is a Who reference.