kettenkarussell

I’ve been fixed in a trance for an hour or so listening to Make Me Love on their myspace and I’ve decided that I’m now in a suitable state to blog. The light pulsations on the track are now but the quickened heartbeat of a digital Venus. Ear to her chest you can hear the polyrythmic beats of her heart. Paralysed in ecstasy the listener is wrapped in a soft synthetic embrace.

It recalls a performance of Steve Reich’s Six Marimbas annotated for one musician which I saw a decade ago performed by a Hallé percussionist, On Make Me Love, it’s as if you can hear a percussionist’s hands working independently of each other, the right dancing about the blocks with hard mallets, the left rattling occasionally with softer strokes. The two tracks share a hypnotic effect and an attention to subtle sonic progression. Towards the end of this 12 minute masterpiece distorted cello notes reach the lower frequencies, if anything could mar the simplicity of their conception it is this, but by the time it arrives I am so spellbound that I just imagine Arthur Russell perched in the corner bowing gleefully.

All thanks go to Philip Sherburne on this one.