Excellent unclassifiable record of performed black murk and sludge from our friends in Austin, the great Josh Ronsen here playing with Vanessa Gelvin. The pair call themselves Bricoleurs for this outing, and the record False Friends Of a Translator (HUSHROOM RECORDS HR11) may have been recorded in 2021 in an attic in Austin, Texas.
Five tracks of continuous swirling mud-like morass creep over us and inhabit us like so much sentient jelly…not since the golden age of science-fiction movies made in the 1950s, spliced with similar “possession” tropes taken from recent exorcism movies, have we felt such palpable dread, dread mixed with strange beauty. Well, we’re told they used field recordings, turntables, and a clarinet to produce these unearthly mumbles and chair-shifters, but I simply don’t believe them. I’m prepared to give more credence to the claim about “singular systems of playing and hearing music”, although that reference to “systems” worries me. What pre-programmed approach, what mode of organisation could possibly work in a situation like this? It’s more likely that sinister goings-on took place in that attic of theirs, a ritual that involved beaming shortwave messages to Alpha Centauri while simultaneously wrenching an unborn squid from the mouth of a passing rook.
Even Bricoleurs themselves are not quite sure what they hath wrought, what bizarre energy they’ve accidentally loosed into the globe. To disguise their true intent, the package arrives with a printed dialogue between Dionysus and Heracles, probably a fragment from a Greek drama beamed to them by psychic means, and the five track titles will reconstruct a nonsensical quasi-philosophical utterance if read in the correct order. Plus there’s a liner note written by Garfield, the bland cartoon cat. Other inserts, too abstruse to describe, go still further with laying false trails and misleading clues. One of these even poses the conundrum “Are Instruments Contagious?”, indicating that these contemporary musicians – outreaching even the most outrageous forms of free improvisation – regard music, or playing it, as some form of disease, a metaphor that works very well at this poignant moment in history.
Josh Ronsen has zapped in on previous occasions with his groups Zanzibar Snails and brekekekexkoaxkoax and often produced outstanding odd and memorable records with lovely packaging and inserts, and while False Friends Of a Translator continues these traditions, it also has a black scheming heart which endears me to it, and a threatening cover image which I take to be a battleship on fire in the imaginary global wars which trouble our creators in their fictional universe. Snap up for immediate seasoning and roast in the oven as needed. From 20 October 2023.