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#30
Maniacs Dream: Zanzibar
CS
SOLD OUT
New album by the most relentless free-rockers in the solar system. Recorded after Maniacs Dream’s trip to Zanzibar, where they succeeded to find the beauty of antiquity. ”How beautiful! Like in the Homeric times!” Bella Blossa said of the harem that inspired him to write the last song on side A. The song is a speed of light free fall into the orange hole, like the whole album! In time! Comes with beautiful psychedelic covers by Bema Bergman!
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"New release from this wild Finnish primitive/DIY/grunt/disruption squad with squeaking, fuzzy guitar lines/electronics and bedroom D??l drum stylings, zonked hands-on LAFMS-style cartoon goof quotient and folk songs of the drugged-at-home variety. Nuts and totally great."
- Volcanic Tongue
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"MxDx are really all over the place but dip their toes most frequently in hippie stew, psych rock/pop, garage jams, and good times. But it's all instrumental. And it's all great. They come lurching out of the gate with an opening track (there's a few different tracks but they're not given titles) that straight up punishes, heavy psych/noise rock jams that would probably feel right at home on Load Records if they added a lame vocalist, lame costumes, and major Arab on Radar worship. Thankfully they don't. This tune goes on for awhile, piling on a hulking drum beat below guitars (I think), keyboards, tape machines and the almighty slide whistle which eventually takes over and plays a disturbingly loopy drone set that'll pin you to the ceiling in seconds flat. Awhile later a piano comes in and more free gypsy jamming start up and continue on into the night in varying forms...often noisy, cluttery, dusty and dirty...just the way it should be. I can't even come up with any decent comparisons for this tape, it's like everything good and decent about "weird" underground music in the past while packed into fiftyish minutes. Imagine your mom running you a hot bath and preparing you some crackers with peanut butter spread on top - that's how sweet and warm these sounds are. Highly and hugely recommended, one of the best releases all year that many people are going to miss out on - don't be one of them!"
- Matt / Outer Space Gamelan
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"Het lijkt zo rustig in Finland. De afgelopen twee jaar deden de finnen behoorlijk wat stof opwaaien met een vloedgolf aan indrukwekkende, experimentele albums. Terwijl zij zich naar alle waarschijnlijkheid bezinnen en hun volgende moves uitstippelen draaien de ondergrondfabrieken in de tussentijd stug door en de laatste episode in het Lal Lal Lal-verhaal komt van het onbezonnen Maniacs Dream, die op deze prachtig vormgegeven cassette van ultrazware doompsychedelica naar zigeunerfolk schaatsen, er wat lo-fi garagepop ingooien en dan nog steeds niet klaar zijn. Alsof het zo hoort, maar niet iedereen kan het. Maniacs Dream komt er mee weg, één van de meest indrukwekkende cassettes van dit jaar en dat voor maar drie euro."
- Joris Heemskerk / KindaMuzik
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"Roope Eronen asked me to point out that Lal Lal Lal is not just him; it's a group effort:
"The other guys are Kevin Regan, Arttu Partinen and Tero Niskanen. All are in Avarus too. I'm playing in Maniacs Dream too. (Spoiler alert!) The names in the cast-list are fakes. It's about the same people who play in MD and Avarus. Most of the most active Avarus people are also in Maniacs Dream, and according to that, there are plenty of people who play in just Avarus occasionally. The core of MD is me, Tero and Kevin: we sometimes play gigs as just a trio."
Anyway, on "Zanzibar", the band piss brown vinegar and are visibly moved by their own inner spirit, embracing mystic hiss and huff w/ mucho gusto.
The music is: itchy/skratchy, irregular, iridescent, ir-angular, iffy, iTunes-unfriendly, inwardly mobile, idiotic, In Vivo/In Vitro, ipso-dipso, intuitive, intestinal, "In Search of Space", intense!
[i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-!]
Yes, Kek, but what's it actully sound like?
Oh, you know, the usual:
Ted Milton from Blurt choking on a peanut.
Pere Ubu's "Modern Dance" played on children's toys with flat batteries.
Mo Tucker gaffer-taped inside her bass-drum and rolled down the up-escalator.
Roland Kirk playing whistles and duck calls w/ his right hand trapped in an electrical toaster (zzzzt! "Like, ouch, man!")
Rhys Chatham attacked by a gang of rabid waiters armed w/ aluminium trays.
It's totally fabulous.
(This looks like one of Ditko's Dr. Strange dimensions gone lo-fi:)
Okay, so how do you differentiate between what will be an Avarus release or an MD one....?
RE: "The sound is just different. I suppose you can hear the difference too. I can't describe it much...usually, if it has been recorded on a 4-track it = MD, otherwise it's Avarus, but it may vary too..."
Do you have a definite but different vibe that you try and go for w/ the two different bands?
RE: "Not anymore, they have melted together. And maybe not even before..."
Do you just play what you play, and try and sort it out later ?
RE: "That's about it. Maybe now the situation is that when we play in Turku where we mostly play, it's MD. But sometimes it's Avarus. Depends maybe on the people. And Avarus has been playing mostly live lately when MD has had only a few shows in total. But yeah, it's almost impossible to answer these questions well. Still it feels right to keep them as different bands because they sound like two different bands. They are different bands although the people are almost the same and the playing methods and wibes are near each other. So what makes a band a band...I don't know. It's nice to think that all the pseudo-names exist. They are quite characteristic in our minds, and they answered the interview on foxy digitalis too. But there's our picture! It doesn't matter how materially those things and differences exist."
(Note: funky aliases, below. But now even I'm confused whether Fricara Pacchu exists or not, but I dig Roope's assertion that it doesn't matter either way)
I love the fact it's called "Zanzibar", but why?
RE: "We were thinking of the name of the tape in a park with Fricara Pacchu and couldn't make anything satisfying. So we decided that two girls can choose that. They were approaching us giving flyers to everyone. They gave us a flyer which had a new bar's name: Zanzibar. It was good enough for us. It's a hip bar in the centre of Turku; very cheap and way too cool. We've been there once."
Do you play one instrument yourself or do you swap around and play whatever is at hand......do you ever 'compose' or is it total improv.....or a mixture.....
RE: "We swap instruments and play whatever is at hand. Sometimes the same instruments for many weeks or months. But it's just how you feel and if you can concentrate on something or not. Total improv like with Avarus. Nothing is played again. Sometimes we did soundchecks before jams, but we've quit that too. A jam can work now as a soundcheck and after that it's also possible that people want to change instruments and sounds.... I maybe miss a bit of more careful recording and shorter jams. Mixture would be good for a change..."
Roope ended by saying: "Now I have to run to make waterfall costumes for the Pylon gig on thursday!"
A day later he added: "Actually, we ended up doing different kinds of costumes from the stuff we dug out from the trash cans. We found two large elementary school clocks and we made boxes for them. And you can actually move the pointers from inside the box! My box has a picture of a toothbrushing parrot and Tero has a lake theme. We'll stay inside the boxes for 15 minutes and play 3 parallel recordings of a waterfall at huge volume and then come out of the boxes dressed in sleeping bags and making stupid noises to microphones. And when we get out from the sleeping bags we have funny costumes. Will be a dark and sweaty gig."
Looking back to that old review from a year ago, I note w/ great interest that Maniacs Dream had inspired me to think about starting a band. By coincidence, when I first heard the scrawling gtr doodles and feedback birds that inhabited this cassette a week or two ago, I immediately put up an on-line advert for a stringless guitar. I wanna play. Now someone's giving me a bag of FX-pedals they don't want.
Fuck. Must be something in the water"
- kek-w