Act II - Mi and L'au (Tour CDR)

Picked this up at the Mi and L'au show at the cube , last September. Like their debut this 45 min single trk CDR was apparently recorded in their log cabin in the Finnish woods, I like the minimalist hand stitching of the package that sort of removes it from the realms of the de-personal.

It has a lovely DIY sensibility – not amateur mind – just not sullied by over attentive production… The music contained within is unlike the folksy acoustics of their debut album and takes a more experimental slant - long flowing drones with guitar sketches and other sound debris wound into the fabric and a distanced song that catches you quite unawares – in texture it has more similarities to Michael Gira’s (seemingly aborted) 'Body-lovers' project, especially some of the heavy dronal stuff at the latter end when repetition gives way to shimmering naturalistic folds.

Trying to describe the music is difficult as - although the music is created by simple means the way it’s been processed and warped out of recognition makes for too many question marks…but here goes.

Loose reverb-ed chords, stabbed bass – oh soak up those atmospheres…

Muted car alarm with slipping guitar lines – the fingerings of ice along a river,
skating towards a song then retracted from your ears into soft abstraction

Deep resonating strings with a glimpse of country – chugging then falling into piano and pastoral noodling with a taut darkness that is fragmented in light for the briefest of moments then scattered to shadow...

Submerged sounds - fidgety fingers sustained. Echoed vocals break through like ghostly spectres then gipsy violin and slow scrapes of fret board to dripping kinetics, like over taut rigging sounds that lap achingly back and forth.

Twinkling chords be-speckle, then bowed strings saturate the canvas – another song promises to blossom – flows round your peripheral vision - soggy helicopter rotors cut it down, then in a gentle lull, within a steady hypnotic rhythm faint vocals from Mi are just audible.

These are poetically photo sensitive as the palette slowly becomes over-exposed to that sluggish rhythm, then snap - severed - and it’s at this exact place that I just fall in love with this disc…abstraction continues with processed dripping like the thawing of the tundra around a warm log cabin in the deep forests of Finland.

Please Young God Records this needs a proper release and soon…



Never did get a signature from L'au in the end...
by the time they finished their set they just vanished...