Rachel's/Matmos
Full On Night
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Rachel's
Full On Night
Quarterstick, 2000
RiYL: Steve Reich, Erik Satie |
The idea for the collaboration was based on the inherent difference in the studio version of "Full On Night" versus its live counterpart. Rachel's co-leader Jason Noble told Nude As The News last year that although he couldn't recall when his group began adding a bombastic rock finish to the track, he and his usually mild-mannered cohorts took extreme delight in tapping into unseen reservoirs of musical angst when performing it onstage.
"A lot of the time, Rachel's is all about restraint and being delicate," he said. "Those are important elements for playing the kind of music we do. But 'Full On Night' is the one moment where we totally release and be nasty."
With that in mind, the collective set to work on committing the "live" version to tape, enlisting collaborator/Shellac bassist/producer and engineer Bob Weston to assist. "Recension Mix" is the fruit of this labor, harnessing the visceral potency of "Full On Night" as well as any audio document can hope to (indeed, experiencing this song in concert lies just a few steps south of transcendence).
What begins as a deliberate exercise in intertwined guitar and piano melodies proceeds to gloriously disintegrate. Halfway through, the pace quickens, as if the instruments dared each other to work in tandem to stave off the rumbling in the background.
By the 10-minute mark, the ominous vibe of howling guitar tones, string-scraping violin attacks, and free-form drumming can sustain itself no longer. The calm-before-the-storm is torn in two by Noble's broad sword-sized thrust of metallic, Shellac-ish guitar riffs wrapped in funereal organ notes. Like a dream so real it shocks you out of sleep, a four-stroke barrage climaxes this "Night" like no other.
While Rachel's take on "Full On Night" will flabbergast those more familiar with the positively cut-and-dry orchestrations of their 1995 album Music For Egon Schiele, Matmos' offering climbs so far up the proverbial tree that it's dangling from a limb.
Utilizing the studio master tapes plus two live renditions of the track in question, Daniel and Schmidt turn "Full On Night" into a confounding, 18-minute amalgam of beat-driven electronica, solitary, melting guitar notes, and speaker-shredding blasts of distorted percussion. Yet, after some five minutes of random electronic manipulations, the duo revisit the pounding fury of the mother track's finale, bloating the guitar and drums into supernovas of pure noise.
Although some might write this all off as a late attempt by Rachel's to flex its rock muscle (Noble, of course, led long-gone Lousville noise rock maestros Rodan and still plays in the heavy-duty Shipping News), the group's willingness to throw all pretenses to the wind foreshadows a host of new ideas down the road.
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?"