New Music From L. Eugene Methe / Megan Siebe, More Eaze
L. Eugene Methe / Megan Siebe
Revisited, Revisited, Revisited
(Eh?)
Countless philosophers have contemplated time and memory for millennia, but one notable contemporary covers those topics in an extraordinarily pithy manner, with equal parts truth and absurdity.
This writer is talking, of course, about the comedian Steven Wright, who has quipped such gems as “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” and “A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.”
One of Wright’s jokes in particular comes to mind when absorbing the album Revisited, Revisited, Revisited by the Omaha, Neb. duo of L. Eugene Methe and Megan Siebe: “Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time; I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
The new album, available on cassette from the Public Eyesore offshoot, Eh? Records, features variations of the stately, majestic theme for the 1981 British television mini-series Brideshead Revisited composed by Geoffrey Burgon.
Revisited, Revisited, Revisited was intended to also pay tribute to the show’s source material, Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, by both breaking down and blurring time and structure, as the protagonist’s memories sculpt the story’s nonlinear path.
When listening to the album, it’s difficult to gauge how much time has passed without a stopwatch. Main melodic motifs appear and reappear through Siebe’s cello parts, almost oppressive in their repetition; however, those themes hardly seem like markers or milestones, and the entire affair feels amorphous. Methe handles the sonic manipulation side of things with measured electronic treatments and echo processing through cassette loops, and there’s occasional sound warping through bent notes or envelope effects, making tones scamper cyclically into various frequency ranges.
At one point, the faint sounds of a sampled classical record can be heard, and it wouldn’t be off-base to lump this album in the worlds of minimalism and ambient music.
Some of the most compelling moments on Revisited, Revisited, Revisited reveal themselves through careful delay effects. Sometimes the echoing provides an urgent pace, and at other times, it allows the main theme to interact with itself, like a round (think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with staggered beginnings for the vocal parts), perhaps like a time traveler having a conversation with its younger self.
Oddly, while the primary melody is hammered into the listener’s head, everything that surrounds it remains a curious, fuzzy memory.
More Eaze
Staring at a Statue of Paint
(Kendra Steiner Editions)
There’s a sort of glistening hopefulness and childlike playfulness in the cluttered electronics of More Eaze—the project of prolific Austin-based musician Marcus Maurice.
It’s a strange type of warmth at play among the bleeps and bloops and metronomic pulse that is simultaneously artificial and welcoming, and this feeling dominates More Eaze’s latest album, Staring at a Statue of Paint, which was recorded in real time.
One digital audio glitch that sound engineers can immediately recognize happens when a waveform is cut right in the middle of a wave, making a sharp noise; while most would consider this to be sloppy, More Eaze celebrates this type of messiness by overloading the beginning of “happiness attempt #1” with such notes. Simple note patterns appear innocuously, but they soon register in the listener’s consciousness like a small insistent child incessantly begging for junk food without changing the form of the request, despite constant denials.
While that distraction is happening, the track gradually becomes more manic and nervous sounding, with jittery notes appearing faster within the framework; this writer imagines that this might be the aural equivalent of what the future looked like to someone living in the ‘80s.
The track “a denial of coin” tends to linger on its pitches, wildly varying its timbres, textures and attacks rather than mixing up its melodic diversity. However, it soon becomes overloaded; imagine a planetary explorer slowly scanning the land with some kind of metal-detector-like device, and the device’s sound output reflects the overwhelming discoveries found.
It pummels the listener with quick, tiny jabs, like a robot cat batting away at a chipmunk. “how 2 build a home” uses a twang effect on certain notes—similar to how a mouth harp sounds—among sustained ambient tones and occasional irregular beats, peppering the 3-D rendered landscape, and the final track, “i never asked 4 this,” features Maurice contributing bright, chorus-treated guitar soloing over churning synth waves before an abrupt conclusion, ending the cybernetic playtime.