Metafather
An odd opening, like a vista covered with ashes, much like the devastation of the London riots in the timeline, proceeds to spread the sound of half-life (brightness, resonance), half-death (filtration, cutoff frequency) into a myriad strike from the hand of two improvising experts. Intense and austerely vivacious, a strange combination of opposites, setting personality finely to music. The voice that enters on ‘Soaked Into Walls’: ‘Looking in / there’s a shape of your past / like a cloud in the night / checking doorways and lifts / sometimes they open’.
The duo that make up Imbogodom: Daniel Beban and Alexander Tucker, have had previous work released under the Slakes and Grumbling Fur pseudonyms. I’d only heard Grumbling Fur’s music prior to getting this, and there is some resemblance in the way textures are degraded, as if material waiting to be recycled. The way this degradation affects the listening process, is debatably to shorten the music to its purest elements: eccentrically sung vocals, piano motifs clean and sharp cut to the chord, drums that power on with little abandon of a skeleton, and a delightfully sober Ambient ending to the album that is half-Christopher Bissonnette, half-Marsen Jules.
Imbogodom succeeds the most when the instruments, in their various consistencies, are allowed to key their surface characteristics with hypnotic key and chord fluctuations, parting the vista, and the ashes, like a rush of the unknown. The best piece here is ‘Mirror Dust’ for combining all these spoken qualities and forming a coherent piece of music. Recorded in summer 2011 in the final days of the Bush House, the music hasn’t aged. This is not ironic as the Bush House was the BBC World Service Hub for over 70 years, archiving transmissions from the news and sound worlds. If there’s one world I want to keep being involved with in years to come, it’s with a copy of ‘Metafather’. Impressive stuff!