#ehse

There’s no sound quite as entrancing as the plain human voice. I’ve zoned to drones and nodded out to noise, but somehow nothing quiets my cortex like words simply spoken. The center of SEF III is Alex Moskos’ calm, assured speech, and it entrances in a way that makes the sounds that slowly gather around him feel like a dream - like surreal events that probably should be happening, right? I mean they’re happening. They happen. I’m not dreaming them, I don’t think. I keep blinking and they keep being there.

This trio’s update on Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” – it changes “I Am” to “I’m” and talks a lot more about clowns – is the most meditative example of SEF III’s hypnotic dream-state effect, but the whole thing is deliciously surreal in many different ways: one track is pure electroacoustic improv, another edits hip-hop songs into pointillist abstraction, another is musique concrète made from sounds of an alien coffee shop (I’m guessing there). What sticks it all to the back of my eyelids is the trio’s patience, which makes every sound seem simply like what had to be. In that sense, SEF III is a must.

– Marc Masters

<a href="http://ehserecords.bandcamp.com/album/sef-iii">SEF III by Eilbacher/Moskos/Moore</a>

ALEX MOSKOS on SEF III

I got really excited about the SEF III project when Duncan Moore showed me his text “I’m Sitting In A Room” and asked me to read it for our first Eilbacher/Moskos/Moore show. In his piece of writing the narrator sits in a room and describes the apparition of a series of clowns. There’s Den with a lion heart, the clown computer named Palisand (“a desktop may wear face paint and make mistakes too”) and Jermaine Calm, the Zen train wreck. Duncan’s reverie is like the software, your imagination the hardware and the text, the clowns as they are described in language, a VR experience. No auxiliary hardware needed like drugs or dare I say it, music. It’s a theme we keep coming back to in SEF III: the imagination as the original VR. We used the text for the first track on the record. Duncan plays tapes and Max plays electronics. As the text develops there is a slow disintegration of syntax and soon the words ring out only sonorously.  Some meaning remains but the experience continues in a clown-y abstraction. Max and Dunc’s electronics really come raining down as you perceive the shattered sentences and feel the clowns.  

When winter’s hot it means the sun is close. Scroll Downers went seeking the sun one winter and got pretty fucking close on their own. It didn’t matter that Lexie Mountain was just starting her recorded journey with David Jacober and Zacahary Utz (late of Dope Body). In fact I suspect the band’s collaborative virginity meant they started out closer to the sun than a more familiar configuration might have. The trio hadn’t worn a path yet and thus could just lean back, stare at the solar surface, and burn a direct connection into their collective cornea.

On Hot Winter Scroll Downers light a fire by rubbing together big sandpaper riffs, concrete beats, and Mountain’s trampolining howl. All three heat sources burn calories like a triangular treadmill, but I can’t help warming my ears over Mountain’s escalating lung excavation. Her rising phoenix of a voice hyper-inflates tracks like “Shake Off the Rays” and the atheist-converter “I Want to Believe” in ways that make me think I could ride a hot air balloon to Saturn. But I should just fly it into the sun, if I’m a worthy disciple of the immolating doctrine that Hot Winter has singed into my brain.

– Marc Masters

LEXIE MOUNTAIN on Hot Winter

Some years it seems as if June lasts forever. Heading back to Baltimore after a Philadelphia show that felt as Baltimore as any Philadelphia show ever could, we found ourselves suddenly in standstill traffic. About an eighth of a mile ahead, a necklace of lights, flashing emergency lights, cop lights, ambulance lights, strung itself across the northbound lanes of 76 somewhere near the airport. For twenty minutes we sat in the rented Rav 4, talking about how Naeem’s party was just taking off right as we had decided to try for our beds in another city close by, and now here we were, stuck. I looked to my right, where a highway onramp curved around a hairpin turn. A car appeared from someplace behind us, kicked up pebbles outside the traveling lane, and, while we watched in disbelief, proceeded to drive the wrong way up the onramp in reverse, hugging the contour of the inner shoulder. There was a beat in which it seemed every car, just as stuck as we, realized it was possible to escape, right here, right now. Just go up a highway onramp the wrong way. Do it. Within moments, car after car reversed up the onramp, until the onramp became its own exit and we drove right the fuck up it in two lanes, waving at cars trying to get onto 76. We’re warning you, don’t go down there and get stuck in all that. Turn around, try the wrong way, and get out while you can.