With Mustard Gas and Roses, guitarist Mike Gallagher (of renowned dirge architects ISIS) unveils a compendium of sparse ruminations culled from years of underground musical experience. An artisticand entirely instrumentaldeparture from band-based disseminations, Gallaghers solo debut is nonetheless in accord with the general aesthetic of ISIS, exploring the same telekinetic atmosphere via more personal and austere means.
As such, Nova Lux is a sonic narrative of post-rock splendor underscored by barely perceptible shifts in the aural firmament, the perpetual inertia of ringing notes, and the low hum of inevitability. The five ominous instrumental passages contained within are headphone music for the drone-damaged; the stirring, vaguely sinister murmurs of a half-remembered occurrence. Punctuated by the pedal steel of Greg Burns (Red Sparowes/Halifax Pier) on track one and the expert beat manipulation of Oktopus (Dälek) on track four, Nova Lux conjures up a nebulous psychic landscape in which the indefinable never takes shape, where the horizon slips in and out of focus and existential trepidation levitates just above the hearing threshold. Gallaghers guitar-based compositions are the proverbial ghosts in the machine, revealing an expert convergence of human expression and electronic technology that plumbs the murky depths and dim corners of elemental consciousness: Echoes of past experience take shape, floating across the stereo field before dissolving quietly into the ether like half-formed shadows at sundown.
The name Mustard Gas and Roses is a reference to a line from Kurt Vonneguts semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse Five, a classic of gallows humor that recounts the horrific but little-known massacre at Dresden during World War II. Known as the Florence of the North, the German city was full of hospitals, wounded soldiers, and refugees toward the end of the War, before Great Britains Royal Air Force dropped 700,000 phosphorous bombs on the population of 1.2 million in the space of 14 hours on February 13, 1945. There were no military units stationed in Dresden at the time of the attack. Over a quarter of a million innocent civilians were killed as a resultmore than by the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.
Just as Slaughterhouse Five laid bare a catastrophic event made deliberately obscure in the annals of world history, Nova Lux assembles the fragments of a corrupted archetypal memory into something almost tangiblethe flashpoint where the collective consciousness and personal recollection collide. Slow and deliberate, spectral and brooding, it finds its purpose with those who listen intently and without distraction.
Seinerzeit (2005, glaub' ich) bei dem Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore/Jesu/Isis-Zwischenstopp in der Berliner Volksbühne die ungemasterte CDR abgegriffen, allerdings ohne zu wissen, das Gallagher einer von Isis-Klampfern ist. War aber im Endeffekt egal - hören lassen kann sich das auf jeden Fall...
Zitat von mgrsounds.comI am quite pleased to report that Neurot Recordings will be releasing the M.G.R. vs. SirDSS "Impromptu" cd. It is scheduled to dominate the unwitting ears of the world sometime in April of 2007. They are good people and I am happy to be working with them again. [...] Also, the new M.G.R. full length is mixed and I will be mastering it in early January. More information about title and release date coming soon.
DOOMEDSOULS
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11.02.2007 11:05
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