Red Rhino, 1988
Zoviet France, or the properly ornamented :zoviet*france: was one of the first truly "experimental" bands that I ever listened to. Moving onwards from my adolescent Skinny Puppy fandom, to Download (also having been a childhood, like 11-year-old, Aphex Twin/ IDM fan), Mark Spybey and Dead Voices On Air, and his previous temporary membership in :Z*F:, this is some of the music that truly opened up my world sonically. Environmental sounds, and broken incidentals of language, were no longer just incidents, they could create music, and nothing quite felt like the surrounding fields in Massachusetts like the organic, crypto-ethnic music of Zoviet France and Dead Voices On Air. With its disjointed, museum-like subtleness and vignettedness, dead languages of greatly forgotten times, like the lost sub-stratum of European and English place-names, Pre-Indo-European mystery languages, Basque, Etruscan, whatever the neolithic builders of the stones of England spoke, seemed to speak to me from this record, and my other favorite, Shadow, Thief Of The Sun, in my environment re-contextualized as the mystery of the original Native American names for my surroundings. It stoked my interest in creatively reinventing lost cultures to regain a sort of subconscious Jungian blood connection to all ancestry and culture as a whole. Listening to them years later, especially this album, the effect still holds. Especially with the melding of spaces and times that happens with the current experimental/drone alchemists, their sound does not date itself. Nor could it ever really be dated, because it is not of any time. I hope it has the same effects on you.
DOWNLOAD
No comments:
Post a Comment