Artist bio
This Bloomington, Indiana-based group has built a respectable body of work informed by Louisville post-punk outfits such as Slint as well as the avant-garde compositional panache of Steve Reich and Brian Eno. The instrumental trio of guitarists Dan Burton and Chris Carothers and drummer Rory Leitch favored brutal soft-to-loud transitions on its earliest material, encapsulated on 1996’s Pills Vs. Planes and the “Modern Gang Reader”/"Larkin" single, the latter of which inaugurated an association with Bloomington label Secretly Canadian. The group (and particularly Burton’s nascent engineering and production skills) had evolved significantly by 1998’s German Water, which teeters along the dream/nightmare soundscapes of such instrumentalists as Windsor For The Derby and Analogue. Ativin paused after 1999’s Summing The Approach, allowing Burton to open his own Bloomington recording studio and rear his more song-oriented Early Day Miners project, which has since released two excellent albums. He and Carothers, minus Leitch, regrouped as Ativin for 2001’s Interiors and plan to continue collaborating.
Albums by this artist
Summing The Approach (1999)
German Water (1998)
'Modern Gang Reader' b/w 'Larkin' (1997)
Pills Vs. Planes (1996)
Ativin
German Water
» JONATHAN COHEN | SENIOR EDITOR
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Ativin
German Water
Secretly Canadian, 1998
RiYL: Windsor For The Derby's Calm Hades Float, Sonic Youth's Evol, Slint's Spiderland |
On
German Water, the much-anticipated first LP from Indiana instrumental trio Ativin, the band extrapolates the intelligent heaviness found on its
Pills Versus Planes EP and complements it with a brilliant handle on composition and musicianship. The result: an uncommonly strong album that satisfies cerebral and physical sonic cravings.
The explosive dynamic between loud and soft is still an integral part of Ativin's methodology, but on
German Water, volume changes are utilized more as elements of a song/sound rather than just for shock value. "Modern Gang Reader" begins at a snail's pace, but by song's end, the jagged double-guitar attack of Dan Burton and Chris Carothers has sandblasted away the song's earlier low-key inklings. Unforgettable.
In the gently zooming, futuristic march "Stations," drummer Rory Leitch steadies the pace as a lone riff repeats in the background. From nowhere, guitars burst into an enveloping riff that might be the most ear-pleasing, head-nodding passage the band has yet penned.
From the skipping, treated guitar pleasure of "Fortune Telling Fish" to the epic "Meeting With The Center Of The Earth,"
German Water is an inspiring masterpiece of forward-looking rock.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?" 