Album: NARRATTI OF TRIBUNE
Artist: Don Mandarin
Label: Nailed Nazarene Industries
Catalogue no: Unknown
Tracklist:
1. MAY
THINGS IN THE PAST CEASE TO EXIST
2. MAY
THINGS IN THE FUTURE NEVER BE BORN
3. MAY
THINGS IN THE PRESENT CEASE TO HARM US
Describing and contextualising
Don Mandarin’s work must surely qualify as one of the six impossible things to
do before breakfast. I’ve listened to a few of his recordings and I found that trying
to pin down such abstruse and slippery abstractions is like attempting to climb
a greased pole. It is at once complex, unreal, as malleable as wet clay, as
solid as concrete, and yet is as subject to interpretation as anything elusive
and ephemeral usually is. In this instance, his first recording issued by
Brazil’s Nailed Nazarene Industries label, this is possibly as close to a
‘concept’ album, or at least a thematically linked work, as he’s ever released.
(Also, I apologise now for any philosophical musings on my part in the
following – combining a Monday morning with a lack of caffeine brings on
altered states of consciousness…)
Track 1, ‘MAY THINGS IN
THE PAST CEASE TO EXIST’, poses something of a philosophical question – does
the past (and by extension, I suppose, the future too) actually exist in any
real sense? Once a moment has passed on, does it cease to be, or is it stored
in some great universal ‘memory bank’, to be retrieved at some point once the
key to open it has been discovered? And if we do, does that mean that any bad
or uncomfortable memories can be erased or altered? Judging by the maelstrom of
hellish overloaded howl on this opening number, there would be some who would
only be too happy to see some aspects of their past selves atomised and
pulverised into non-existence. It’s as if some ravenous beast with a black hole
for a maw sits ever-ready to ingest the concept of the past (and the collective
memories of all) and consign it to oblivion. And, given its 20-minute running
time, some have a lot of regretful actions to sort through…
In some respects the
future is the most malleable of the time streams, and track 2, ‘MAY THINGS IN
THE FUTURE NEVER BE BORN’ is the one thing that all of us have wished for at
one time or another. A sustained fuzzed guitar chord roars, building and
collapsing, suggesting that the concept of the future is flexible, and only
subject to change before it’s actually happened (ie. it’s not predestined or
set in stone). At only just under two minutes, there’s a possibility that it’s
also suggesting that one quick moment of action is all that’s needed to change
outcomes.
Noise ambient is the most
appropriate nomenclature for the final offering, ‘MAY THINGS IN THE PRESENT
CEASE TO HARM US’, with its washes and planes of sweetened noise and drones
that to my ears appear as harbingers of hope and promise, tempered perhaps with
the knowledge that we must be ever vigilant. A wordless voice drifts along with
the currents which directs it where they will, darting through white clouds
which nevertheless roil and churn through endless layers of atmosphere. It is
for the most part positive but veined through with a seam of the negative, as
if saying that we should grab the good but be acutely aware of the bad that
might tag along with it.
An intriguing suite of
pieces, tied together through the idea of time and its elusive qualities, which
together tell a complex story without layering on the aural convolutions in
order to do so. We each relate to time in different ways, and experience it
uniquely. I suppose what I am trying to say here is that my reaction to NARRATTI OF TRIBUNE is filtered through
my own entanglement with time, and that if you read between the lines there’s
much that you can glean from this. My own preference is for works that make me
think, not just inwardly but outwardly as well, and of all the Don Mandarin
I’ve heard this has been the most thought-provoking by far. As far as I am
concerned, that’s what I want from music – and this has it in droves.
Available as a download
from Nailed Nazarene Industries’ Bandcamp page:
Psymon Marshall 2019.
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