Well folks, it’s been fun spending the past two weeks focusing on albums from my collection that were made by artists who call(ed) current World Cup nations home. In case you haven’t been keeping up with this theme, the previous nine installments were: Vangelis (Greece), Fela Kuti (Nigeria), Granada (Spain), High Speed & Afflicted Man (England), Atoll (France), Ekseption (Netherlands), Perigeo (Italy), Jorge Ben (Brazil), and Achim Reichel (Germany). And since America will probably be eliminated on Tuesday by Belgium, it’s only fitting that the final day of this World Cup 2014 themed An Album A Day voyage be dedicated to a Belgian artist. Enter Ignatz.
Brussels-based Bram Devens has been releasing albums as Ignatz since way back in 2005. I came to learn about him from the Aquarius Records e-mail list, which for almost a decade was my go-to source for finding new and enjoyable music. The first album (self-titled) was release on CD only, I believe, and the second one was cassette only. It wasn’t until Ignatz II that one of Devens’ albums was pressed to vinyl. Like most of his early releases it was recorded for the Belgian (K-RAA-K)³ label. I found my copy at Amoeba in Hollywood on June 27th, 2009. It was cheap and it was used, but to finally be able to file an Ignatz record in with my collection, I was happy.
Upon its initial release in 2007, Aquarius had this to say about the record:
Ignatz II (or III if you count the recently reviewed I Will Soothe My Eye To Feast It With A Sight Of Beauty cd-r) heralds the return of our favorite alien Appalachian troubadour and another transmission of fuzzed out, obfuscated, FX laden, bedroom free folk outer space buzz and shimmer. Not too much has changed since I (a past AQ Record of the Week), but if anything, the sound of Ignatz has become even darker and more expansive, and somehow, impossibly more beautiful and mysterious. Another haunting and dreamily disorienting stopover in a musical journey to points unknown. While some of what you see or hear on II might sound familiar, it doesn’t take too long before you realize that the sounds here are… well, different, off kilter, damaged, prettiness is present but summarily obfuscated. Bits of folks and blues surface here and there, but are slowly and methodically transformed into a whole new shapes and sounds. Every melody, at first warm and inviting, begins to twist and change, becoming some bastardized blues, sometimes broken down into jagged shards and stumbling cadences, other times splattered into glimmering glistening sonic sparkles.
The root of Ignatz’s sound is still a wonderfully gnarled Appalachia, guitars and vocals mostly, drenched in filthy spacey FX most of the time, but even when delivered sans effects, they manage to sound alien and otherworldly. Ghostly abstract dirges, lengthy meanders through epic and ominous landscapes of blown out slow burn riffs and bits of delicate fingerpicking. Hovering above are wistful, abstract vocals, distorted and indistinct, wrapped around mournful melodies, the whole thing stumbling and slightly off kilter. Occasionally the guitars build into huge thick torrents of fuzzy riffing, dense and chaotic, before the riffs crumble and threaten to fall apart completely, until the vocals and guitars tangle up and become more and more indistinct, a slow shifting cloud of blues shimmer and folk swirl.
It almost sounds as if someone pulled apart some old blues 78’s, piece by piece, note by note, and then, hundreds of years later, reassembled them without any instructions, utilizing some as yet undiscovered alien technology, only to discover that THIS is what music sounded like in 2007. What a strange world it must have been….
This warm and warbly, futuristic ancient folk is a masterfully mangled Delta blues transmitted from planet to planet, and with each million light year stretch, the sound becomes more tangled and less obviously blueslike. Alien musical transmissions intercepted using an old victrola and played back by some crazy old man, sitting on his porch, armed with just an acoustic guitar, a pile of busted old wax cylinders, and a huge bank of broken and rusty effects pedals…
So goddamn great!
Ignatz
II
((K-RAA-K)³ – K053, 2007)
A1. He Deals With Love & Her Eyes Glaze
A2. I Was Not There
A3. The Dreams [MP3]
B1. Silver Moon… Shine Sun! Sun! Sun!
B2. Hurling Incense
B3. She Will Freeze
B4. All Your Love
