BOSCHS
WITH YOU – never thought it may seem
(CD,
R.A.I.G.)
It seems as if postrock is coming back to us, only in a
more exciting and less trite way than back then when there were thousand
bands without any significant amount of talent for every good band – and
that good band was mainly Tortoise and a handful of others. Would that have
to be called postpostrock then? Or maybe the term postrock is being applied
nowadays more loosely to any band that plays instrumental songs and likes to
take its time to build dynamics and atmospheres. Because that label has been
put to bands from Isis (the late one) to Don’t mess with Texas and from Worrytrain to
anything on constellaion.
So it is probably time to bury the term completely. Aahh, feels a lot
better, doesn’t it. Now that we got this burden off our backs, let’s
turn to the eerie magic that is Bosch’s with you.
Hard to pin down what Bosch’s with you are doing for
real, apart from taking their time to produce a auditive landscape that is
fascinating and spooky, mesmerizing and like a dark dream at the same time.
The four piece sees this release as the first part of a trilogy, of which
the second one is called “As if” and has been released on vinyl on KNVBI
records, so you’ll probably never hear it. Me, for all I stand for, will
take this part as a separate entity, because what else can I do. The trilogy
is called “dreams that come a thing” and its theme is probably that
tranquil state of mind when you lie in bed half awake and already half
asleep, so that everything that goes on around you is registered half by
your conscious and half by your subconscious. And then you float in and out
of that state until you fall asleep or get up in the morning.
I know that there are people who train hard on
meditation and mind controll techniques to be able to willfully pass into
that stage and then remain there, because in this phase the subconscious may
produce a lot of interesting ideas and visions but unlike full sleep and
dreaming there is still enough of the conscious mind working to help you
remember and ponder what you experience. With me though, this state never
stays very long, because I sleep way too little. About 5 to 6 hours on
weekday nights, which means that when I lie down I fall asleep almost
instantly. And then on weekends I fall asleep really quickly as well, but if
there is nothing special I may sleep eleven to twelve hours, which is just
great.
All of these images about dreams, nighttime, the
subconscious and meditation work themselves into my reception when I listen
to “never thought it may seem”. That the quartet divides itself into two
people responsible for “sources” and two responsible for
“researches” adds to the picture. The state of undecidedness, the grey
area between two definites is wonderfully reproduced in the static flow of
these tracks. Most songs have a constant layer of a single frequency hum or
drone underneath over which guitars harmonize interferences or a band
situation evolves from which a wonderful melody comes forth. Never is the
music in your face or straight forward; always does it refrain in the
background of its own sounds, within the subtlety of picked notes of the
guitar or the piano in the midst of soundwaves.
Unfortunately the CD tends to skip and skit in my
player which really dampens the pleasure that otherwise would flow freely
and plenty from the amplifiers. The most of it is in smaller things and
details, though. The way pounding drums are mixed into the back and at one
and the same time emulate far away folkloristic drums and a muted heartbeat,
and then grow into the foreground together with the half guitarchords that
waver through like the heat of a hot day lingers on a beach after nightfall.
Or when the songs turn into carefully ebbing noise drones. It is definitely
though a record for the time after sundown, for the lonely hours being wiled
away with doing nothing much at all, but with the danger of having your
dreams invaded by a softly creeping feeling.
