Eloine + Ypsmael / Coims
Split
USA PUBLIC EYESORE EH? AURAL REPOSITORY 123 CASSETTE (2023)
As per title it’s a split tape between two acts…Eloine is an alias for label boss Bryan Day, while the mysterious Ypsmael still lurks inside his secret suit of armour refusing the efforts of any who would presume to analyse the outpourings of his teeming brain.
Their four brief engagements, with titles such as ‘Tiefenstrom’ and ‘Hinge Down’, may involve home-made objects rattling it out with electronic humming units, but the overall effect is very far from a day at the warehouse where refrigerators and spanners can be lifted down from the shelves by able handymen. Indeed the duo’s aim in life seems to be to create an air of unreality, divorced from any physical or mechanical truth. It’s uncanny how they manage to reach this twilight state in a very short space of time, crossing the finishing line in under three minutes in some cases. Recording information indicates they did it in California and Germany, so the sessions here may be derived from tape-swapping rather than direct hog-dancing in the open live arena. If so, that geographical distance may have translated into something audible on the tape, causing a vaguely troubling sense of absence to stain the senses. Unless I’m completely wrong and it was part of their 2023 tour. Less “scrabbly” than your typical Bryan Day trip to the seaside; less able, me, to generalise about Ypsmael having only heard them once before on Box Of Black. My reservations about their “tentative” approach still apply, but I’m digging the Rod Serling moods and atmospheres of doubt summoned here.
Coims are from Bristol UK, who we heard and enjoyed on their 2020 release for the EH? Aural Repository. On their side, they serve up five tracks of great brevity, moving themselves directly into that unique space of theirs where they can squeeze out extremely odd and queasy shapes. Last time I thought it was modified guitars and rag-a-bag percussion, today I’m not so sure. Electronic organ? Beatboxes? A saxophone made of unsalted butter? Delicious non-riffs sit perched just on the edge of familiarity, like a gigantic bird you see from ten paces away and then it turns out to be a walrus with wings and a large felt hat. Their eccentric humour – and I would maintain it is a deliberate, natural quality – makes their side a welcome relief after the slightly puritanical earnestness of Side A. Plus you get the low-grade surrealist poetry of titles like ‘Cleavers Cordial’ and ‘A Puffin’s Coffin’, both of which would feel at home if discovered as missing titles from Trout Mask Replica (although the music isn’t something the Captain would have recognised from twenty leagues away on a foggy ocean). Where Coims overlap with Eloine + Ypsmael is their determination to keep going – having embarked on a perilous voyage, even if it’s just a trip to the local grocery shop, they see it through as far as they can, and play by their own rules all the way. (OCT 2023)