Friday, December 3, 2010

Bone Awl / Furdidurke "Split" 7"


I'll clear up that this record is not exactly a re-release of the tape from 06; the two original Bone Awl tracks have been replaced with a single song, but the Furdidurke song is the same as on the CS, so whether or not you want to track this one down depends on how much of a Bone Awl maniac you are. Why they did this I do not know, I think Furdidurke should have re-recorded their track to make it a complete package, but that's how it goes. So if you don't have the CS, def pick this up for the Furdidurke, it's my second favorite song of theirs and worth the price just for that. "Main Song" is a bit more introspective and moodier than laters, but still has the creative charm and atypical harmonies you expect. Less energetic than the valiant battle hymns of their CW tape, it's cool to hear Furdidurke's not-so-bright side. Also, I don't know if it's just me, but watching the record spinning plays serious fucking tricks on my eyes, the sticker just has their name written across it, but as it spins the ornate lettering swirls into the craziest shapes, and looks like it's moving on its own. Yeah... So OK the Bone Awl side, like I said it's just one song now, it's actually a bit more technically dynamic than their usual stuff. I guess I should compare it to the two original tracks that this "RP" replaces. I actually like the new single track better, it's a bit crushier and the riffs are a bit catchier, but you can tell the song came either came from the same recording session as the two originals, or they did a damn fine job of recreating the originals' sound quality. Still retaining the repetitive monochrome marking their sound, here's what they do on this: There's an A, a brief B, and a C which is a hair shy of being a variation of the B, and the C goes through several variations, so it looks something like ABC1C2C3, and the A is about equal in length to all the C's. What's interesting about this is while the A guitar remains unchanged throughout, the drums switch between two distinct patterns, and then in the C, the drums remain unchanged throughout while the guitar goes through variations. So it is a very symmetrically laid out song, what I wonder is how aware Bone Awl was that they were doing this, creating something that is visually symmetrical in an abstracted form, or if this was by chance. A lot of the early modernists of the late 1800s-early 1900s experimented with idea of music that has unique elements to the notation itself, I'm thinking in particular a Russian piano solo called "Promenade" by a composer I'll have to look up later (it's not Mussorgsky's or Kuramoto's, it's someone else), and it was a pair of treble clefs that when you play the left and right hand you get this incredible floaty, atonal muck, but when you play hands separates each line is actually the brightest sweetest sounding little melodies, and the song also used a centric tonality, which was relatively new at the time, wrapping it into an extremely symmetrical form on paper. I'll try to find my sheet music later and scan that piece onto this blog, or just tape myself playing it or something, it's a pretty cool connection to the Bone Awl song's structure. Everything is one.

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