PSI CORPS – Tekeli-li
(CD, r.a.i.g.)
The Russian Association for
independent genres, short R.A.I.G. has released many a strange and weird
records, and even though some are musically a lot further out on the fringe,
more progressive or even more extreme in all respects than “Tekeli-li”
by Psi Corps, the idea this is record is based on is a very strange and
startling one indeed. And that is mostly due to the early master of the
horror story, Edgar Allen Poe, who’s narrative “The Adventures of Arthur
Gordon Pym” has initiated this album, which turned out a soundtrack to
that story.
Next to HP Lovecraft there is
no one so masterful at bringing about a spine-chilling atmosphere in words
as it was Edgar Allan Poe (and don’t even mention Stephen King, you dumb
nut). And Psi Corps, being Michael Blackman on various kinds of guitars and
Alisa Coral on everything else that you need to make up a real band, also
manage to bring about an atmosphere fitting to the story of Pym getting lost
in the antarctic and the strange things that happen there.
Musically they ramble through
fields that are somewhere between what was left of progressive rock in the
Eighties and electronic jazz of the early Nineties, which sounds terrible if
you read it like this, but is not so at all. It mostly comes from the
whirring and whooshing sounds that Coral seems to like her keyboard to make
and the fact that Blackman prefers a lot of echo on the sound of his
guitars. Of course that fits the endless, white nothing that is the
antarctis. Fortunately, I think, they haven’t tried to emulate late
nineteenth century sounds or bigbands to get the feeling, because in my
opinion the ingredients and issues of the story – I don’t want to
mention too much not to spoil anything in case somebody hasn’t found an
opportunity to read it yet – are timeless. As is the eternal ice.
Oh yeah, let’s wait what
global warming will do to the polar caps. Maybe in a few decades these
stories about ships and people lost in the ice can be treated as revealing a
sense of place of long gone time.
Anyway, the music works,
because once while I was listening to it, somebody entered the living room
and asked: what is that spooky music? The last time that happened was about
twenty years ago and I was listening to Fields of the Nephilim, can you
imagine that? “Tekili-li” – the title refers to the sound birds
featured prominently in the story make, also a symbol for the more and more
lost connection to reality in the narrative – is a chiller in many ways.
It has a brooding, dark quality that ebbs and flows forth during the course
of the album and makes for an intense listening pleasure. Moreover it fits
nicely into the retro-hype that Tangerine Dream seem to have lately. There
should be more tales of Edgar Allen Poe made into movies, stageplays and
records. But not musicals, please, I loathe musicals. Musicals scare me for
completely different reasons.
