Mythic Failures
1…
“Communication is no longer possible” says Jacques Attali, economist and author of Noise.
2…
“Innovation is the wrong motivation for musicians” says Taylor Deupree, 12k label boss.
3…
“We are all someone else’s innovator and our own followers” says Dan Abrams, Fenton/Shuttle358.
4…
The cover of Mythic Failures features palm trees, blue skies.
5…
An album, as physical object or nebulous download, is both a fixed point and something transient. Any review of an album, any writing around it, is even more so. Paraphrasing (and possibly misusing) Anthony Gritten, dialogue around music is used to “tighten up” our relation to music by bridging the simple dualisms we encounter – music and noise, brain and body, performing and performance – but also as part of a desire to possess music and sound. Rather than possession, Gritten argues for a relation to music that sits on the “infinitely thin” edge of a coin that flips between possession and anonymity. His suggestion is that we drift.
6…
Mythic Failures drifts. It hovers between the space of delicate composed gestures, and simply exposing the mechanisms of the process – see the tape speed changes of Blonde, the loop points in Rubai – a smudge of colour here, a distant tone there. Mythic Failure drifts; not as indecision but as movement, as a refusal to be fixed. There are clear parallels of course with the most recent Shuttle358 record, but Mythic Failures feels warmer, smaller – brazier rather than campfire perhaps? Hints of chamber music, viols, major key phrases, each piece feels like it could be the introduction or the conclusion to something longer, each feels like we are getting photograph stretched to five, eight minutes length; small moments of palm trees, blue skies, bathed in warm static.
7…
Though nominally a ‘side project’, the music Abrams is making as Fenton is confident without being definitive, beautiful without resorting to tired trope. I’ve listened to little else for days, and it is wonderful. A fantastic way to start the year from Abrams and 12k. Highly recommended!