Beneath Iowa City is a black blind and beautiful warren riven with secret passages. We are musical rabbits, noisemaking ferrets, multiplying in the spring chill.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Newly Night People, Part 2 - Nautilus - "Big Shadow"


This tape is actually the reason I decided to write about all of them. Almost unbelievably rich, a thickly layered – yes, I’ll say it – tapestry of stringed instruments, tenor synths, and wordless, skillful vocals. This is not damaged, fractured in the way mostly given to Night People releases to be. It’s not much for structure, but it’s not afraid to sound ‘right’ and even pretty. I’ll admit I’m thinking of elves the whole time – there are harps in here, dulcimers – but I don’t mind one bit.

Side A is all one long song. Song? Side B opens with, well, let’s catalogue – a pulsing strumming bit, a high theme on three notes, a low drone, and a tenor drone, with the texture of a snake-charmer’s flute. Then soon we’re through to a duet of wordless female vocals, semi-moaning, semi-droning, semitoning. And enter another stringed instrument, utterly simple but otherworldly. It all shifts and twists so quickly, in so many different directions – and yet all these shifts are integral, the experience is singular, a continuous journey.

These guys and gals are all clearly musicians, in a sense that doesn’t apply to all the acts with releases on NP. There’s an air of improvisation, but the playing is delicate and there are no ‘wrong’ notes, nothing to take you out of the fantasy being created.

The coming of the sandman is first of all something to be experienced in the ear. Its force consists above all, perhaps, in the unsettling strangeness of what is ‘to come’: ‘The sandman is coming’ can be heard as at once a statement of what is already happening and as promise and/or threat: it is undecidably constative and performative. The sandman is to come, through the ear, still.

-Royle, The Uncanny

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