Second missive from this mysterious Ukrainian ensemble exploring the dark and cobwebby corners of free folk, shuffling rhythmic tribalism, space-y dronemusic, and splattery free rock ambience. A dreamy and expansive travelogue of endless soundscapes, glassy sheets of crystalline shimmer, warm and smooth, with melodies woven subtly throughout. Metallic glistenings, tinkling guitars and glitchy crunch struggle to disrupt the ambient dreaminess while occasional machine like rhythms chug tirelessly over atonal melodic clusters and urgently strummed angular guitar chords. Even though the band themselves describe their music as ‘personal folk music’, the actual sound is much closer to the drone music of AQ faves Jonathan Coleclough, Mirror or Organum, and occasionally the free ambient clatter of the Dead C or Skullflower. Really gorgeous stuff.
Review
The Moglass – Telegraph poles are getting smaller and smaller as the distance grows
The Steady Click of Motion
While it’s not surprising from whom the Moglass takes its cues – Fred Frith, Tangerine Dream, Loren Mazzacane Connors – this three-piece experimental/ambient group from the Ukraine adds process to the often distract approach of their predecessors. Recorded on Christmas Day, 2000, Telegraphs Poles are: is plainly packaged, just an album title and song titles in Russian. The substance inside is equally as plain, slowly gathering energy from the movements of the various instruments to gain peaks and descend back into valleys without ever climaxing. This creates a sense of impending frustration, a feeling that the album explores and exploits. The rhythmic current is comprised of digitalized sound bytes and earthy phasers layered with appropriately filtered guitar reverb, and channels Frith’s guitar/effects bag and the louder parts of Connors’ Come Night. This disc would be right at home in the Constellation Records stable, beside the airy side of Godspeed You! Black Emperor that rises between orchestral chugs, and the machination of Hanged-Up.
Individual pieces are often lost to the listener, as the album slips quietly from one track to another with pauses that barely register. The opening track, “A”, whispers with a graceful ambience and hints at the digital clicks and manipulations to come. Morning ascends midway through the piece, and the sound spirals into a promising contentment. Other tracks, all in Russian characters, strike and destroy this premature settling; the second track stabs through a whistling darkness, and the fourth track echoes its bleak wonder and questioning calls from the upper register. The third and fifth tracks introduce the steady swishing call of train-like beats and the response of carefully plucked guitar notes, the first human presence on the record. The last track is largely silence, with the occasional interruption of soft, but chilling digitalia.
Pieces subtlely unfold with purpose and direction behind an abstract veil. It’s hard not to suggest Western associations of the Eastern bloc and former Communist states – the machinations, the eerie strikes of frigidity, the frozen land – but these might be projections by myself rather than receptions. While the invocation of isolation is unavoidable, might this not be the regular creak and slap of a motel vacancy sign in a Florida hurricane, or the emptiness of a Northwestern forest full of illusionary enemies? These enemies are distinctly natural, organic, with no inherent suggestions of a Soviet pall cast over a landscape already frightening to begin with.
Songs stretch out, real time melts as the repetitions become the album’s inner clock, losing us in its labyrinthine counting. At once a recording of abstraction and machination, Telegraph Poles: is barren and desolate, a cold desert where the traveler is lost, but finds some comfort in following the endless line of telegraph poles.
By Joel Calahan
The Moglass – Telegraph poles are getting smaller and smaller as the distance grows
The music on this new record by The Moglass deals with space, motion andtransformation, rail and Paul Bowles books. It consists of six tracks, twoof which are edited and all were recorded in 2001. The first track dealswith quite minimal, simple melodic repetitions with bursts of electronicclusters. Each track seems to convey a different mood.The second track being darker in contrast to the first with more distorteddelayed style guitar playing with a touch of a western film feel to itmixed with harsh sharp electronic sounds. Meandering melodies on theguitar and synth sounds add to the chaotic mood.Different elements and strengths appear throughout the CD with some tracksbeing more electronically dominant and some more guitar based. Theelectronics using repetitive organic scratching beats and also as in the4th track, quite Fm chime sounding electronics in contrast to theharshness of the previous tracks beat giving a sweeter air to the wholepiece.The second last track on this CD is heavily electronic based with arhythmic beat theme pulsing throughout accompanied by Spanish type guitarstrumming and other elements weaving in and out. This leads into the lasttrack, which is quite a complex electronic piece mixing delicateelectronics shards against a constant background.Throughout the CD one feels the tight improvisational interplay betweenthe three players distinctly.
The Moglass – Telegraph poles are getting smaller and smaller as the distance grows
This is a new release from the Ukrainian label Nexsound which is under the direction of Andrey Kiritchenko. This time the Ukrainian trio The Moglass presents their fifth production with 6 tracks recorded between December 2000 and January 2001, performing a free-rock, improvisation and drones; playing guitar, bass and electronics. This disc offers spacey and expansive atmospheres with tinkling guitars creating deep rooms of soundscapes. While the other facet of the trio its dark with strummed guitar and reverbs, creating atonal melodies. This music remembers me of Tom Carter (Charalambides) in the way the guitar is played, and their silences produced.
Text Guillermo Escudero
The Moglass – Telegraph poles are getting smaller and smaller as the distance grows
Seamlessly incorporating textures from far-reaching extremes (AMM to Tortoise to The Cocteau Twins), The Moglass are an intriguing group from the Ukraine. Though recorded nearly 4 years ago, and released a while ago, I’ve just received a copy through the fakejazz corporate office.
Gurgling synths and pillowy textures introduce the album, giving the impression that The Moglass would have been right at home playing in an Ann Arbor living room in 1996. For the next two tracks however, the band aims straight for the sun with astral clatter, chirping electronics, reverse looping and structureless improvisations that seem to be occasionally subject to an easily distracted mind (which is good, as the parts being played and explored shift and redirect themselves, keeping the songs fresh).
Though, as with most improvisational music, there are a few times where a part is overplayed, and an idea is pounded into the ground. The Moglass are a guitar/bass/electronics trio, so while their instrumentation lends itself to these improvisational pieces, the more straightforward, composed “songs” have a unique twist, as they are all drumless. This gives the band an understated quality that plays to the strengths inherent in the bands’ moody textures. Four of the album’s 6 tracks are at or well beyond the 10-minute mark, which allows these moods to build, contract, and spread themselves heavily. The airy texture of the fourth track plays perfect counterpoint to the jarring loop in the fifth. The album ends with a minimal foray deep into the world of careening electronics and pulsing tones. Not many albums begin sounding like a tribute to Grimble Grumble and end sounding like a tribute to Xenakis. Hopefully The Moglass will keep making more of these.
sean hammond