My Review: BIPOLAR EXPLORER - Memories of the Sky

 Bipolar Explorer - Memories of the Sky

Three survivors act as a radio bridge to the earthly epic of disintegrated souls, blown up in a sky that only wishes to keep the memory of what happened: the reasons for the disaster are contemplated, the seeds of the end are developed with sounds (and not songs) that, besides narrating, excludes (with very few exceptions) the song form. It seems that in the head of the sole author of this mammoth project (Michael Serafin-Wells) there is a computer attached to a crater, with worms, raptors, slag, shavings, hammers and an avalanche of telluric tremors illuminating the vault of heaven in celebration of a predictable defeat.

Thus, millennial paths are created, tales that exclude singing but involve the crooning and storytelling of Summer Serafin and Sylvia Solanas, who are nothing less than female angels with tears in their vocal chords.

The initial Big Bang is nothing compared to this procession of lava, burrs and gasps, in the burning graveyard of an apnoea dream. 

The words move like tired comets while the Moog Synth, the bowed guitar, the percussion are patches of a wound compressed between these sonic sheets that sink moment after moment.

It sounds like a flight, Birdy's (and indeed that Peter Gabriel who wrote the soundtrack might think he had found grandchildren far more warrior-like and swaggering than he), in which what is seen turns into the due exaggeration of sounds like genuflecting light poles. Everything is heartfelt but slow, raising tension, embarrassment, annoyance and the certainty that it is not pleasantness that strikes our bellies. And it is from there that the sound transforms into the transition and translation of a path that finds the barrage of an era that no longer has any visibility.

A psychedelic journey into the madness of slowed-down prog, into tiny approaches to the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, when, that is, we can listen to almost songs...

They are, however, moments, errant flashes, a micro-world that cannot move forward. Not only is Michael a visionary, but he proceeds with the eleven compositions of the first disc, and then in those of the second disc he disturbs the typical nightmares of the industrial music of the early days, the English music of 1976 to be clear. Hence the astonishment: a New York project that has lived in the Land of Albion since before the appearance of human beings. Epic, granitic, devastating, this twelfth album of theirs and fifth double deepens the need to make harmony subtle and instead confront the molecular deconstruction of pop, rock and, as mentioned earlier, the song form.

The guitar is the mother who comforts her children, and it is all the work of Michael Serafin-Wells, craftsman of time, holder of the sceptre of the atom that becomes a moment and, extraordinarily, repeatable. Here the applause must go off, trembling and nervous: this talented researcher and developer of the destruction of all artistic ease puts on his helmet, blindfolds and scratches history, geography, enters the nuclear chemist's office building his bomb, postatomic. One finds oneself in a bowl of sand in which black notes descend like mad scalpels.

An obscene, terrible, heavy account, where the air dies in the expositional glaciality of echoes and reverberations, delays and mechanical robotic repetitions in which the rhythm is never sustained by the drums but by the loops of a vigorous ipad determined to instil fear and continuous hallucination.

Nature, be it birds, fish or whatever, is the only one that seems to have dignity, the only one to have survived, and when the bells come, there is no doubt that it is the wind that rings them.

Experimentation in the German sound workshops of 1961 and 1962 would be horrified at this mixture of mishaps, sonic outposts and attitudinal clichés that seek human and ideal loops to slam into the bowels of an idyllic tremor. The debacle of storytelling cannot provide empathy for an accommodating mode. 

Indeed.

What happens is an avalanche of last breaths in decadent flight, in search of the earthly underbelly, like a liturgical but agnostic deposition of intent: there is no God in this record simply because man has disappeared altogether, and from his ashes these fragments were born.

They are suspended and then torn visions, orgasms of moon particles celebrating corroded silence, monstrous creatures emerging from the bodies of memories, in a distorted and fulminating assemblage.

There are no long arpeggios but notes, clusters of notes, crooked notes, notes without the possibility of a stave to worship their power.

It is continual destruction, fragmentation and never dreamed of diffusion: real nightmares are slow, dysmorphic, wild and abrasive.

In certain moments of the album we understand the importance of Television and a brief part of Virgin Prunes' career (A New Form Of Beauty) when the approximation of a musical parquet found space in the murderous instinct of reckless phrasing. 

Stars plummet, the ellipse changes its mind and the streets become hypnotised warehouses of memory. In order to realise all this chaos, the parameters of fantasy are narrowed down and we indulge in obsession, like patients of a compulsory health treatment laughing at the non-communication between the parts.

But, a fundamental aspect of this work, is the NON-COMMUNICATION, there is no talking and no listening, but everything is fried reasoning, with doses of drugs scattered within the constant hissing of this basal noise.

One finds oneself considering certain groups as ancient ancestors of this staggering enactment of obscene cruelty: one should imagine how the non-music of these twenty-two decomposed molecules are nothing less than a new testament, a new ascending score, because, for real, everything that falls finds a way to rise with greater circumspection.

There is no joy, nothing sunny, just a high atomic mushrooming that seems to seek a base to rest bitterness and desolation.

Of Neo-Folk music, this double album has the sense of synthesis.

Of industrial music, it has the bloodiness of a continuous laceration against truths.

From classical music it has everything: the modesty, the ardour, the theatricality seeking paralysed applause on a working day.

The party is an unseemly cry that cannot attend.

Of Shoegaze remains the abundance of controlled distortion.

Of Dream Pop the slab after a dead dream.

Of Rock the idea that everything dies....

What remains is the smell of a tragedy, a song with no listening ears, an electric chair with high voltage but no muscular reactions.

To put it simply: a project that excites the Old Scribe because one finds oneself in the future, with the right doses of terror and ambivalence  tearing composition after composition.

Stoic is the intention to distort the process of approaching the listening, while what lives between these grooves is a persistent rejection of the audience, human footsteps are not desired and the waves of the sea contaminated by asbestos and the traces of oil on the seagulls' wings (among the absolute protagonists of this LP) are preferred, to connect with the pain that synthesises a proscenium and an abandonment.

One finds oneself, so well, in Poe's amniotic sacs, with his neuroses, and in the spectacular stylistic conversion of the leader of Psyco TV: a continuous twinning with youthful, non-senile dementia. The events of a time curled up in cadaverous sounds and female voices submerged in the din, like moving tombstones waiting for the evil grin.

Magnetic and cruel, the story of the arresting dream vibrates in full credibility given the thickness of this convex system, which allows an escape from all acceptance.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

29th November 2024

https://bipolarexplorer.bandcamp.com/album/memories-of-the-sky