NEWS REPORT:
It’s been a pretty incredible 10th anniversary for the lords and ladies of Constellation Records. Do Make Say Think rethought their entire method of writing and recording music on You, You Are A History In Rust. This year’s Suoni Per Il Popolo was utterly dominated by globe-spanning and time-reversing Constellation collaborations from Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin to Halim El Dabh’s Barking Dog Sextet. Rhys Chatham threw together a motley crew of local musicians to perform a single note lasting over an hour and Jonathan Parent’s Feu Therese improvised alongside Damo Suzuki. Constellation’s Autumn releases represent friendship and influence with Vic Chesnutt’s North Star Deserter, reinvention and extension with Sandro Perri’s Tiny Mirrors and finally an achieved degree of focused subtlety with Hrsta’s third venture Ghosts Will Come And Kiss Our Eyes.
Hrsta is one of the four big brainchilds of legendary songwriter and ideas-man Mike Moya. After founding Godspeed You! Black Emperor and then letting it learn how to hunt and fly by itself, he moved onto more psychedelic, improvisation-based projects that straddled the millennium such as Set Fire To Flames and Molasses. Hrsta, coming out of the same thunderstorm as these other groups, began without much direction. Blending the use of tape-loops with a loose-conception of slow-folk songwriting, their compositions were either too much of one or too little of the other. Seven years and many distractions later, Moya, in my opinion, has finally found a stable voice for Hrsta.
BOOK REPORT:
This album is anchored in the perspective of Moya’s guitar and Brooke Crouser’s (Jackie-O Motherfucker) pump organ. Whistling together, they embody the ghastly presence that Moya’s lyrics set the stage for welcoming. Moya’s reference to ghosts in the album’s title is a hint that what is invisible and hidden in the cracks of these songs is perhaps what we as listeners should be looking towards for meaning. Where there are no words being sung, there are. “The Orchard” is a hallucinatory night vision of horsebacked policemen burning down a fertile landscape, as for resolution, there is none. This lingering echoed fuzz waits through half of “Haunted Pluckley” to pounce, and then destroys whatever instruments had been playing and whatever voice was singing. “Hechicero Del Bosque” definitely stands out as the album’s freak-out scene, slowly building to a tremendous speeding jam not unlike Comets on Fire or Dark Meat.
If its one thing that Hrsta does impeccably, it is their ability to glue their songs together with melodic but droning instrumentals. Every track on this record feels a bit eerie like walking through a cemetery on a 16mm film reel. Moya’s raspy half-singing/half-whispering fits well with this ghastly aura, or perhaps I just associate pump organs with the ghosts of dead traveling preachers.
- Entre La Mer Et L'Eau Douce
- Beau Village
- The Orchard
- Tomorrow Winter Comes
- Haunted Pluckley
- Hechicero del Bosque
- Saturn Of Chagrin
- Koror I
- Holiday
Track Listing
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Wed, 30 Jul 2008
Hrsta
: Hrsta, Eric Chenaux, Castlemusic at La Sala Rossa, Montreal Canada
