Friday 19 November 2010

DOWNLOAD: Legendary Weapons of China - Molten Mirrors

Legendary Weapons of China
Molten Mirrors

DOWNLOAD

I've been meaning to write up their previous double-A single but have been sitting on it so long they've recorded and released this full length in the time its taken me to pontificate over it.  You can still get that for free (It's got one track from this and another unique to it) but now there's this fuller beast.

This band is a London based two piece whose members call themselves R-E and Shanaz Mon Zaki. They are both components of the seven strong clan that constitutes the Auspicious Numbers blog, a cabal that throws up various combinations of each others audio visual sonic artistic and text creations.  This incarnation has two of them aimed at the ears and one at the eyes - Super Sinister created the cover art for this as well as their blog and visuals for gigs.  So, Legendary Weapons. Does it sound like a bejewelled boating holiday on a creepy killer whale populated lake?  Yeah, why not.  It doesn't take long for the cosmic oscillations to get rocked by some charging percussion and all of a sudden they've cast themselves into unchartably inhospitable waters, like High Wolf  tearing open the chests of Lopatin's synths, it's an exploration between the twin spheres of the earth and sky, of swampy murk, claustrophobic heat and the galactic energies of space.  Big themes, big sounds crushed to tape. Technicolour hypnagogic carnage whirling up from storms across instruments, pieces of melody getting tossed around the crashing surface looking for something solid to get a grip of.  Enough of the analogies.

There's 5 tracks here, each one tweaking out a different shade of the bands character. Royal Herbs is the path finding foray, as you'd expect from an opening track and it sets the scene well, like I laid out up there.  By the time you're into the tribal jungle depths of High Roots there's little sky left visible over the canopy with a really meaty double kick pedal sound that pads out the bottom end, bouncing off the stick clicks and cavernous bubbles and pops of the synthnoise machines that snake their own polyrhythmic course across the percussion.  The final title track Molten Mirrors comes in just under 20 minutes, giving itself plenty of time to work through morphing grooves and pools of drone, never rushing itself and staying locked in for its entire length.

A few physical CD copies will be made available by contacting them by Email, handmade to order, if you're lucky.

2 comments:

  1. WoooH - shit! this band is great! Ari's right as well - it's a great review too...

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  2. thanks, I appreciate it. This band is great glad I could get them one more fan!

    ReplyDelete