Set Fire to Flames
is a loose Montreal musical collective who shares members with
Godspeed You Black Emperor!
,
Fly Pan Am
Hanged Up
, and other units. This debut offering, which appears on
Alien 8
rather than
Constellation
, is akin to the music of their sister band only in shared personnel.
creates sometimes
minimal
/sometimes maximal soundscapes from a wealth of instrumentation guitars (four of them), reeds, brass, strings, a host of percussion instruments, reel-to-reel tape processes, and more. The disc was recorded in various locations around Montreal and Vancouver and in front of the public library. While in places they share the ability to create haunting, melodic soundscapes that move through varying realms of tension, such as on the suite
"Steal Compass/Drive North/Disappear,"
they are just as apt to give themselves over to entrancing
noise collages
that hold the same space of depth perception that labelmates
Shalarabi Effect
use. Where
Godspeed
has become more musical,
picks up the abstract edge, employing dissonance, found tape recordings, and field-recorded voices of street people to weave the disparate threads into something gorgeous and heartbreaking, while motivated by musical and sonic textural poetics of empathy and compassion; it translates to the listener in profound ways. Issues of tension and language are considered, but not resolved because they don't need to be; they are both perceptual and process-oriented movements from one identifiable space to another. To move more into critical space as to what songs work and how would be a betrayal of what this recording is actually about (since mere cultural theory is not the sole or primary ambition of what is presented by
). Suffice to say that
is a band who uses the totality of sound, nuance, (im)balance, texture, considerable tension, space, and impression to create a music that is highly original, deeply evocative, moving, and beautiful. In typical fashion, the packaging of
Sings Reign Rebuilder
is aesthetically attractive and alluring; it's a kind of fetish object, which is multiplied by the double-LP version. ~ Thom Jurek