Aranos, Jon Mueller, and Chris Rosenau - Bleeding in Behind Pastel Screens
(Crouton)
This is an interesting, challenging piece of music. It's a collaboration between the Bohemian radical multi-instrumentalist Aranos, and Jon Mueller (percussion, electronics) and Chris Rosenau (guitar, electronics) of Pele. It is a fertile combination. Fans of groups like Nurse With Wound and Volcano the Bear should dig it, as should any enthusiast of music that doesn't sound anything like music but more like a more evenly mixed take on that garbage truck that's doing hell knows what outside your window at 5 a.m.
Fortunately, it starts off easy. "The Other B is Flat" opens with some light, scraping electronics before a gypsy folk acoustic guitar pops up. More warbling, rising electronics and a bit of violin, both straight and processed, all get thrown into the mix. What results is at once old and recognizable, like a dream of the past from Eastern Europe, and new and unfamiliar, like disquieting, open-spaced ambience. "Monstrous Majority Muddle," is far more abstract as it mixes the ambient parts with jarring cuts to sound bursts, like alien radio signals suddenly coming in on your AM dial. "Peculiar Atlantic Game Fish" ups the action with a more aggressive concoction of electronics and other bizarre noise coming in from all directions in a massive collision. Best of all, though, is the inappropriately titled "Hair Blond Like Summer Swingsets," which juxtaposes electric guitar pulse chords, processed piano and other crazy electronics with a horrendously ominous rumble.
Like much of our better, newer music, and, generally, all good art, Bleeding in Behind Pastel Screens rewards the patient and the not-so-easily deterred. This is not a record you can get a handle on at a Tower Records listening station. It must be lived with. If you choose to let it in, it can teach you a thing or two.
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