Label: Penultimate Press

前作同様の超高内容、お見逃し無く!!活動当初はセルフリリースをはじめ、8mm Records、Chocolate Monkといったマイナーレーベルから音源を出版、その後KyeやPenultimate Pressから発表したLPタイトルにて大きな注目を集める事となるClay Kolbinger & Jameson Sweigerのゴーストブルース・コンビMaths Balance Volumes。シンプル且つメロディアスなギターとオルガン、水面に落ちる小石の音を捉えた素朴なフィールドレコーディング、スミソニアン・フォークウェイズの音源にも繋がる様な絶妙な枯れ具合の全11曲。









Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song with simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent Janet’s Song weaves mirror elements alongside the sound of pebbles on water.

This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation.

Tonight flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. Egyptian Wedding sounds like they operated off the depths of a rotating well. Forming a round is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do.

There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around. What has happened ? I will let you contemplate that. But for me, in this case explicitly this press scribe is chuffed at the consequence of this reversal. Very happy indeed.