About Main$treaM High by Albert Gestal
I recall the Sweedish/American artist Claes Oldenberg once said: "I am for an
artthat takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends & accumulates and spits & drips, and is heavy & coarse & blunt & sweet & stupid as life itself" Not only does this CD from blue Mountains' audio-phonic terrorists
'Main$treaM' spit & drip, it also projectile vomits, ejaculates, bleeds, regurgitates
& urinates at anything which reeks of artists structural conformity, which reminds me of another quote from Claes Oldenberg: "I am for an art that embroilsitself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top"
According to their website (www.painfreefoundsound.com), Main$treaM High formed to "fight mediocrity in the new preppy cool anxiety age of cultural intolerance & retail therapy addiction"
These seditious cultural extirpators provide a nightmarish soundtrack to this post 9/11 era of obligatory mistrust, censorship, xenophobia & the constantly vigilant paranoia which has been imposed with Kafkaesque prejudice upon its citizens by sinister & sadistic archimandrites who are suppossed to represent us, of a future which has failed to live up to the expectations we were once promised. a world which is not sure of what it wants, but it wants it now!
Track 1, the moorish sounding, 'The Maf" features the phrygian scale Andalusian atmospherics of an earthly Spanish guitar, & a cathedralic, ominous almost gothic choral line with an echo of Tuareg Mujahedin which is besieged by a battery of pitiless 'shock and awe' air-raid electronica.
track 3 'Desert Storms' foloows along a similar mid-eastern theme with "Qawali" style chant of "No More War' -the vocals almost hidden in the overall mix as if the voices of the oppressed & the innocent are striving to be heard in the exchange of artillery & gunfire. sometimes Main$tream High sounds as if youv'e played every CD you own- all at the same time. they are influenced by everything & by NOTHING! On closer inspection I notice bits of post industrialistS: throbbing gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten & electro-industrialists like Front Line Assembly & Skinny Puppy interspered with bits of 'Aggrotech' & dark-tronic imagery: cacophonic exerpts of techno-trance cybernetica, overdriven heavy metal guitar, electrnic percussion. keyboard passages of sublime orgasmic delight moving with ethereal elasticity as in track 10, the FIRE DOG, featuring som edelightful excerpts of flute & clarinet which made me feel like lighting up the candles & incence & soak in a bath tub only to have this heavenly peace shattered by the Cannibal corpse enthusiast & Psychotic Doctor DJ- Schizoid sharing a room next door in the relentlessly infernal putresence of "See You In Hell" featuring all manner of death-meatl voiced gutteralities. their choice of instruments represents practically every memeber of the musical family: flute, oboe, recorder, clarinet, bouzouki, violin, guitars, bassas well as turntable. By the time I reach the cinematic-noir of 'She's Losing Sleep' -I'm having hallucinations, only the concert hall placidity of 'Red Pig' which sounds like a chamber piece simultaneously written by stravinsky & debussy and with Schoenberg tuning up in the back ground returns my senses to some degree of normality, AMAZING STUFF. Albert Gestal.
This is the first Main$treaM album as a band. The band formed in 2006 to fight mediocrity in the new preppy cool anxiety age of cultural intolerance & retail therapy addiction. The album started with just mic making an entire album, mainly glitched jungle tracks, and during this process, a friend: Yiani started playing guitars to “The Maf” & “Desert Storms” –it sounded great. After initially discounting it as a novelty, the project expanded into a “almost wack, bastard child of Aphex Twin, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zep, & Metallica before the haircuts” –ed.
Soon after, Rosa & Tom joined the band, writing original pieces & solo’s that help make the entire album sound as one track. A soundtrack. It’s certainly a hi tech futuristic music with all the cool old metal and rock you almost think you know. For original songs, they seem so familiar so immediatley listeners have remarked. There is a rumour it will be a movie- more on that later.
The album breathes, as it billows out of the speaker’s -in and out for 47 minutes, it is definatley ‘some kind of monster’. M$ HigH is alive….Bringing back the epic feeling songs without boring you to death. Songs like 'Getting Rid Of Arseholes' and 'Desert Storms' - lines like "No More War" points the finger right at the worlds war mongers. Culture used to run opinion, somehow reality has seemed distorted since 2001. so much so, Main$treaM needed a voice this time around. The album is full of vocals, clarinets, flutes, violins, bass, synth bass, guitars & many instruments. All the performances are real & live, piano, keyboards, guitars, bass, violins, recorder, drums & many many other instruments are all real & recorded at the institute. No time stretching or pitching on guitars- all speeds are real. No pitch correction or processing on the vocals at all. The beats are played drums, played percussion, triangles, & shakers with a mixture of classic jungle breaks & original programmed loops. This album contains no serious levels of amen abuse.
Over all Main$treaM HigH the soundtrack, sounds like a pretty freaky school. Apparently the inspiration was that some of the band felt the world had gone very bland in too many ways. The fear that is out there now…the types of drugs people are abusing on mass…the escapism people are chosing..the types & amount wars they are waging (and why) …the mediocrity people are embrassing, the intolerance & racism they are expressing- all now seemingly normal day to day life. All stuningly displayed in Ultra sickuts –Anxiety Time For Preppy Cool Crystal Meth collage` -the centre spread poster for the Main$treaM High album. Enduring this cultural climate far too long, the band went back to school –to MAIN$TREAM HIGH 1987! We picked up everything we liked about music when we were 15years old & merged it with what we love about music today. Hopefully tracks like 'Getting Rid Of Arseholes', 'Desert storms", 'Friendly Corporate Tyranny' & all of it really will inspire change, -big change, get the 1950’s big daddy mindfuk war loving child killers OUT- you can do it!
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