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"nervesandgel" [ 2 x CD ]
"From dirty socks to Sybian machines, the thrill of autoeroticism finds its way into the weirdest outlets. Johnny Wohlfahrt alone is Nervesandgel, perhaps the most self-indulgent entity the Denver music scene has ever birthed. Recorded across four years and two full discs, his eponymous opus occupies the hitherto hidden space between David Tibet and Will Cullen Hart, lubing up fractured acoustic pop with a slippery fistful of fizzy ambience and electronic squawks. And the solipsism just keeps on coming. "I Lay to Rest Where Once I Was Wasted" is at once tranquil and nauseating, and "Eating Food From My Tummy" is unsettling onomatopoeia. But the record's climax lies in the Nurse With Wound-inspired "So Confusing Yet Oh So Beautiful" -- a title that, naturally, ends up being a perfect self-description. After all, there's no one better at servicing Nervesandgel than Nervesandgel itself."
"Navigating its way through minimalist acoustic ballads, ambient soundscapes, melodic electro-synth, and finally descending into the realms of sound-collage cacophony, nervesandgel is difficult to get one's head around on the first few listenings; but within the many densely-layered facets it contains, there's something to both sooth the soul and wrack the nerves of just about anyone."
"This is an odd record by anyone's standards. It's an artistic distant cousin to Alexander Spence's Oar and Orbit Service. There's something a little off to these songs, like an eccentric dark side peeking out and having fun with sound. For that, there moments of sublime beauty like "I hope you understand" with it's simple but rich layer of ambient noise and ethereal male vocals. It's a rare musician who pretty much opens themselves up so completely in their music and this guy does it so powerfully in a way I haven't really heard before. This is the kind of thing Pink Floyd tried to do with Echoes but I don't think the people in the band at that point were as emotionally exposed as was Syd Barrett (and I say this as someone who prefers their post-Barrett material on a regular basis). White noise, spectral organs, gently strummed acoustic guitars sounding like they're being played by a ghost beyond the wall of sleep. They should commission nervesandgel to do the soundtrack to House of Leaves because it's deeply haunting and mysterious like that. A lot of it is simply not music but well orchestrated sound setting a mood, an atmosphere, a montage of sound. If you hung out in the house from that famous Shirley Jackson novel and let your imagination run free, you'd probably come up with stuff like this. Or if you spent a lot of time alone, living in a lighthouse in the Bahamas contemplating the meaning of your existence and coming to peace with it all and yet knowing your tranquility won't last forever. The music here is very much about subtleties and larger arcs of conception rather than pop hooks and catchy lyrics. This album came out on Best Friends Records and it has to be, bar none, their most challenging release to date. That label consistently puts out great music but if you pick this up expecting something along the lines of The Maybellines and Breezy Porticos, you're in for a big surprise. The first disc is an ambient album but one of the better ambient releases that I've heard in years. I don't know if the writer of the music is familiar with Stars of the Lid, Pteranodon or Popol Vuh but he also sounds like he watches Aguirre the Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now regularly. His sounds, like those movies, evoke that state of mind that resides in a hyper reality, beyond surreal in the realm of mythic experience where even the air your breath and the feeling of your breath takes feels connected and alive. John Boorman infuses his movies with this sense of being beyond time and place. If you've seen nervesandgel in the live setting, this is not the same thing. His live show is incredible for its stripped down folky sensibility mixed with sound collages. This is probably that whole thing taken to another level with instrumentation that would be difficult to execute in person. There are songs with lyrics but even those make Devendra Banhart seem incredibly accessible and so not weird. That's pretty hard to do. "I Don't Want To Wake Up" is like a series of jump cuts with the folky music sliced together seemingly at random with wet noises made with the throat - like a person choking or emitting tiny bursts of air. Some later era Hawkwind has some music like this. The crackles and pops like you'd hear on a beaten-up 33 or a 78 across a number of songs gives the entire musical experience of listening to these "songs" a feeling like you're looking into a high tech yesterday. Edward Bellamy's vision in reverse. There's really nothing like this. It's partially music and partially aural art but it's never boring. That is, if you have patience for things like an old Brian Eno record or the first three Aphex Twin albums and early Future Sound of London. What sets it apart from those is that it's definitely coming from a different perspective. It is analogous to the ambient thing and just as cinematic and conceptual but also a little darker and weirder than most. Worthwhile for anyone who wants to hear the beauty of the human mind at work and expressed directly through music and not through the filter of expectation and conditioning. If you're expecting a 3 1/2 minute pop song with a hook, as you've often been trained to expect, nervesandgel won't give it to you. If you're expecting a genre exercise of any kind whatsoever, this isn't for you either. It's simply a consistently diverse and rich collection of noise and musical experiments. I'd call it nervesandgel's Metal Machine Music but there's no implied "Fuck you" to a record label or outrageous self-indulgence involved. All of this sounds like the guy means it, whatever that is. At turns ambient, new wave, electronica, experimental electro pop, psych folk and who knows what, this self-titled release isn't likely to ever quite be dated."
www.fagsandgel.com
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