ACCELERA DECK

Sunstrings EP

CD, Scarcelight

This is the boss doing it himself. (No, not “The Boss”, the boss of Scarcelight Records, Chris Jeely.) Does he, as bosses will do sooner or later, follow rules such as “if you want to have it done right, you gotta do it yourself”? I don’t think so, because then there wouldn’t be any other artists on his label. To me, Chris Jeely, sounds more like a “A job worth doing is worth doing well” kind of guy. That might be the reason, why at 49 minutes this hardly an EP in the proper sense (though the 49 minutes include a “hidden” track of about 15 minutes all in all.) One more aside before I move onto the music: according to the info available this is “33 minutes of music released on the 3rd day of the 3rd month with catalog number 33”. Does that satisfy the numerologically inclined autist in everyone? It does with mine. Like the 8” - 8artists - 8minutes per record – limited to 5x8 exclusively – record series by Dhyana-records. A neat idea.

The first quarter of an hour track, called “dross” is hacked, psyched and manically changing noise. At first I thought Masonna, but it was more structured and a little less excessive, but then everything is less excessive than Masonna. Actually hard to listen to due its constant changing of tonality and eruptive bursts of noise. Mostly consisting of one or two layers of sounds, the track leaves open a lot of spaces, and if the high frequencies don’t get you, the punch between milliseconds of silence and full noise will do theirs. Kind of like the tracks that Kid606 recorded with a broken harddisc, only less lush and with less input. A true party-wrecker. I like it.

After that, the second track starts off with one big wall of sound that is like a beautiful red sun you can fall into and all you’ll feel is warmth. After about five minutes the pressure of noise starts to fade until there is but a slight trickling of sounds gently moving in the background. Guess, does it work its way up again from there. Nope, it just sort of trickles away completely. “Sunstrings”, as this piece is called, is my personal highlight on this record, because there are truly beautiful arrangements of gentle sounds into big big buildings of noise but also just softly flowing streams. Perfectly crafted to fall asleep to: at first a blanket of sound wraps you, comforting you as fully as you have never experienced. And then it slowly gets dowzier, softer and quieter while you fall asleep deeper and deeper. Nighty-night.

Track #3 is just a really short something, that I seem to have missed completely. Hm, strange. Sucked into a time-warp again? I could tell you, that it is called “777” though – so maybe some reverse Satanism-thing?

Next on are some strange bleeps and peeps, weird patterns and crackling noises, that open up the hidden and untitled track number for about half of the fifteen minutes it lasts. Nerve-wrecking spaces of nothing between short shriecks of sounds that you can almost here trying to work themselves through firewalls of filters, levels and other gadgets and almost every attempt being futile. And those little sounds that are able to make it through alive and start to exist sonically fade away as fast as little sparks of light. Think of an open fire, with a little ashes flying, but without the fire itself. Then it gets a little more dense, with some rhythms building up – or is that my mind desperately craving for something it can hook on? – and then… nothing. For quite some time and with a final ping it all ends.

The music is all made up of sounds from an electric guitar, reworked and mangled by oscillator and computer. Most of the time you wouldn’t be able to guess it is a guitar you are listening, too. It is hard to believe even if you know it. Towards the end of track one it gets clearer. And the beginning of the second track could almost be Jesus and Mary Chain gone over the top and frozen in a time capsule. Or My Bloody Valentine trying to play heavy music. Is the source of the sounds you are listening to really important? If it an electric guitar I’d say yes, because it is the single most important musical instrument come to bloom in the last century. We are yet to see what this century can do with computers and samplers, but in the meantime I am convinced that there is still a lot of live and new ideas to be scraped from the good old six-string.

I imagine Accelera Deck playing live either standing almost hidden in a darkened corner, maybe a little up a stairway or in full flashing light on a real stage with computers and cables all around him. In the first scenario it would be hard to make out the connection between the guy playing that guitar and the bursts of noise and sounds bombarding the listener’s ears. In the second scenario the connection would be quite obvious. Both are great, ironic and post-modern statements about the meaning of rock-guitarists as icons in music. As iconografic as Jimi Hendrix burning his still amplified and droning guitar or Derek Bailey getting all epileptic and cryptic over his acoustic stringset or Leonid Soybelman putting yet another pair of forks and spoons between his strings. (Is this proof that the public lost interest after Jimi Hendrix and the Kirk Hammets and Joe Satirianis took over the lead in the public eye?) Am I taking it too far now? Maybe so, but on the one hand, I could talk about the power of the axe for even longer than that. And the way it will be treated and formed in the future.

All in all, this record leaves me puzzled and wondering about many things, which is good. Is this a trail of music that has a future or is it a (terribly interesting and large) cul-de-sac? Well, most of the time I’ll put this on, it’ll be with track #2 programmed, but anyway. The devastation and the broken nerves will heal again and the experience will pay me well.