Photo: Bandcamp
This country has a fine legacy of exploratory, occasionally ear-splitting guitar music. Acts like HDU, The Subliminals and Jakob spring to mind as bands who took from post-rock, krautrock and other genres with ‘rock’ in their name, and used them to test the limits of the form. Or to put it another way: jam.
Flying Nun Records have released this debut from a band who fit snugly into that lineage, featuring four hypnotic, evolving tracks that stretch out to nearly an hour.
In the late nineties, Steve Reay, Brendan Moran, and Jared Johanson, joined with Andrew Meier and Simon MacClaren to form The Subliminals, who released one album called United State, then bowed out of existence.
It's become a cult classic, and it was born of some musical pedigree: Johanson had played with Bressa Creeting Cake, Moran with The Hasselhoff Experiment, and MacClaren with Loves Ugly Children, three student radio favourites.
Reay and Moran later formed Avoid!Avoid, who similarly put out one LP then called it quits.
This new formation, consisting of Reay, Moran, and Johanson, is called Vor-stellen, and on their debut, Parallelograms, they - by their own admission - are picking up where those other projects left off.
This is music born of a rehearsal space: I doubt anyone brought in chord progressions to teach the other members, and suspect the songs came about through hours of improv. Every track aims to mesmerise, and the playing has unorthodox flourishes: On ‘Pollen Carrier’ Moran interjects regular snare fills, Reay piles on fuzz pedals and impressionistic riffs, and Johanson squeezes every last drop of juice from that bassline over the track’s 12mins.
I imagine a high degree of focus and stamina is required.
The press release mentions “ad hoc electronic layers”, and this element is subtler: on ‘Folding of the Time’ it can be hard to tell if you’re hearing washes of guitar noise, or something else.
Avoid!Avoid’s album was called Particle and Wave, a title which alludes to quantum mechanics, and press for this album hints at a similarly scientific approach, saying Vor-Stellen want to “transform pre-determined ideas of music into open-ended sound objects”.
Mostly it’s enjoyable as the sound of three people in a room together, inspiring each other to play for as long as they need, and smearing their tracks with noise that’s as interesting as possible, always in pursuit of something new.
