Review: Brutalust - 'The Waste Land' (Crow Versus Crow)

If you like your music 'vanilla' with verse, chorus, verse and with a lovely tune....look away now. If, however, you embrace music in all its variant forms however challenging then this is one for you. Crow Versus Crow is a great label run out of Yorkshire; it is a label that never shies away from the thought provoking or the visionary. Case in point is this latest release from Brutalust, 'The Waste Land'. Brutalust are Maria Sappho and Colin Frank (Frank on percussion and electronics, Sappho on piano, saw, theremin, synth, voice and electronics), "a piano and percussion duo specialising in contemporary experimental composition and improvisation."

On 'The Waste Land' these sonic explorers take their palette of noises and sounds and paint a myriad of musical pictures; some are captivatingly beautiful (the piano on 'Hans' is sublime) while some verge on 'musique concrete'. The Bandcamp page uses the word bricolage and that sums it up beautifully - an object lesson in 'junk modelling' (please note, I do not use the word junk in a prejorative sense but rather in the idea of finding many, disparate sources). Tracks like 'Verification' utilise a saw to create a disconcerting backdrop over which percussive elements bang and crash; on first listen it sounds discordant and confusing but listen again and it becomes something beautiful in its chaos. On one track they take Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya’s '6th Piano Sonata', a powerful piece in its own right, and strip it down and rebuild it, adding dissonent electronica, dramatic silences and percussive crashes - incredibly powerful and utterly absorbing.

Let's be honest, this is not for the feinthearted but to anyone who likes to be challenged in their listening habits 'The Waste Land' is an immersive and imaginative album of experimental music making. It requires concentration but that is a good thing; too much music these days is disposable, bland and completely devoid of taste, the aural equivalent to McDonalds - this is more like a Heston Blumethal creation, taking the weird and the wonderful, putting them together and producing something tasty! It is out now on Crow Versus Crow as a tape and download.



Links:

Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

Crow Versus Crow Facebook

Brutalust Bandcamp