#pleasurecraft

Quarantine isolation mood. New Canadian band, give them a listen.

Pleasure Craft - Nothing Every Happens

That Epic Reggae Set - Pleasurecraft (2001; Beat the Robot Recordings)

Here, the destruction of the idea of the album, an idea incessantly finding its own definition riddled with restless loopholes. The Myth of the Perfect Album: allegedly concept-driven, polished, and organically unified by overarching musical and lyrical themes, or narrowly circumscribed within the universal narrative of humankind: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution ad infinitum. All fragments of sound coming together in the end, bound by a particular sense of purpose in a state that is fixed, final, and fully formed, perfectly circular or symmetrical in shape, one massive, macro-flow closing in upon itself.

Pleasurecraft exposes nothing but its own shortcomings as singular, finalised entity, allows nothing to rise and fall but its own micro-flows as they interrupt each other; it is an album aware of its conflict with itself, a veritable collage of consciousness. There is no climax or denouement here. All spectral echoes of influence (Guided by Voices, Pavement, and The Music Tapes) collide into each other, producing a wide array of variegated effects. On intimate, heartfelt tracks like “The River Yu” and “Beat”, noise wails in the distance, two contradictory elements exist on the same plane; “I’m Not Martha” opens with a violent cough and finds its vocal track buried beneath all else, and “I Burned Manila” boldly proclaims that two opposing ends of an established binary have both defeated themselves (“it’s punk rock, she breaks me heart / and disco failed me”). Titles like “REM Is Using A Drum Machine” and “I Dream of Beans” have no immediately apparent connection to their subject matter; form and content gaze at each other from disparate vistas, allowing music to proliferate in the absence of unity. Songs are short and simple, yet their juxtaposition against one another give rise to a secret hint of complexity; the medium is converted into the message, or the ostensible lack of concept is the very concept itself; the narrative of picking apart the narrative.

Pleasurecraft is an arrangement a variety of different musics against the face of the towering monument of Music; Pleasurecraft is the dance of sound, noise, and music, basking the glory of its own fragmentation, wallowing its own self-evident contradictions, and persisting beyond the sum of its contrasting parts.

-Itos Ledesma