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New volume in Mattin's "Songbook" series, one of the most interesting projects in the current experimental, improv and noise scene. Layers of avant-garde tradition culminate in a collection of tracks that go beyond themselves. In a time of growing despair emerges a strange album: a disintegrated manifesto that explores the truth of disagreement. Featuring Cathleen Schuster, Moor Mother, Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Marcel Dickhage and Lucio Capece.
"Songbook #7" features Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Lucio Capece, Moor Mother, Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage and was recorded in November 2017 at the Digging the Global South festival in Cologne, as Europe slowly fell apart. Exactly 100 years ago Europe was truly falling apart. However, there was a proposal for a collective future in process. This songbook takes two moments as historical inspiration to rethink the present: 1) The first seven months of 1917 in revolutionary Russia. 2) The figure of Germaine Berton (depicted on the cover), the anarchist who in 1923 was accused of killing Marius Plateau, director of the French far-right organization Action League. In a time of war and fascism, those were two very different responses: a collective attempt at social transformation and a solitary desperate gesture. Neither response really managed to bring down capitalism but they had a clear motivation and idea about how to act, something that seems to be lacking today. If previous songbooks dealt with the tension between improvisation and song structure, between an emphasis on production in the moment and having a structural framework, here the tension arises from confronting the present and the past, and in doing so also explores the tension between communism and anarchism. The tension between the individual and the collective is also present on the album (especially on track 6, a discussion about their own goals and degrees of success). Some review of Songbook #6 even took Mattin's name as the name of the group, which leads to questioning what Mattin really is: another example of the fiction of self-conception. Songbook #7 deals with some of the most important issues of today: the dissolution and disillusionment of the social fabric, the rise of fascism, the lack of coherence in a collective vision of the future and the shortcomings of democracy in a capitalist system. The times we live in resemble being trapped in a gif, and here the answer is to seek a different understanding of time and history. If musical references are needed, it is possible to imagine one of those collaborations between Red Crayola and Art and Language if it were produced by Roberta Settels, or if Rabit were asked to remix Luigi Nono's La Fabbrica Illuminata, bearing in mind the 2005 demolition of the Altoforno di Cornigliano factory. The musicians participating in the album try to think about the present through the prism of radical historical moments and in doing so manage to achieve music that is at once arcane and futuristic. In a time of growing despair emerges a strange album: a disintegrated manifesto that explores the truth of disagreement.
