The most accurate impossible label for Ankitoner Metamars might be crooner electronica... This new adventure by Spanish alternative/experimental music veterans Anki Toner (Superelvis) and Javier Piñango (Cerdos, Mil Dolores Pequeños, Destroy Mercedes, Druhb) combines obscurity, radical leaps from melody to noise (and back) and a rock attitude in songs that wink at Leonard Cohen, hypnotic improvisations and ultramelodies that might turn out to be obsessive violent rhythmic processes one step away from Suicide, ot the noise of Whitehouse or Borbetomagus. Electronic rock built on loops, combining physically generated sequences (after all they can play) with good old appropriation.
Ankitoner Metamars is almost the first public activity from Anki Toner in 10 years. It is also Javier Piñangos return to rock (in the most basic, less formal, meaning of the word), after years of work in the field of minimalist-experimental-electronic music. And it is also the first time they work together (if we dont count guest appearances in each others former records) since they live 600 kms apart. So this is a project in which comebacks, reencounters and distances have set up the field for a different, hybrid, voluntarily undefined approach, in which we find music (played, recorded, sampled, cut and pasted, assembled and sung), noises, lyrics, loops and melodies, all of which are treated with the freedom found in those who only trust their own intuition. These two guys no longer try to plan what they are going to do, they simply do it. Then come astonishment, fun, surprise, anger...
This album, recorded between Barcelona and Madrid, is planned as an LP, with two sides. It features seven tracks, one of which is a cover of Leonard Cohen (Hallelujah). And no, it is not a deconstruction-reconstruction of the song: it is the kind of cover that tries to be faithful to the original song, at least until it finds that the song explodes in a crescendo of harmonicas, despair and sound thats swallows the track.
The rest? From the ever-changing succession of sequences in Reality to the obsessive claustrophobia in Emotion (featuring Lydia Lunch on vocals), there is time to wander quite near pop borders (Kaleidoscope), insanity (in the hypnotic loop that feeds My Name Is: My name is NOT, My name was what your name will be, My name is what your name was...) or even rock paths (Get Around, a rewriting of an old Destroy Mercedes song, bared from its original psychodelia and electronically refilled with classic rockandroll iconography Brian Wilson, Highway 61, Light My Fire and some other kind of rock Comelade and Pierre Bastien).
The final track of this album could be no other that the eight-minute-long What Is Love?: organs, static harmonies, silences, voices that scrape and romanticism that explodes and explodes and explodes.
Ankitoner Metamars, a project specially conceived for live shows, is what it is... and could hardly be any other way.
Tracklist:
A Side (22:28)
01 REALITY (6:21)
02 KALEIDOSCOPE (4:44)
03 MY NAME IS (4:48)
04 HALLELLUJAH (6:35)
B Side (22:15)
05 GET AROUND (8:16)
06 EMOTION (5:37)
07 WHAT IS LOVE? (8:22)
(Voice in 'Emotion' by Lydia Lunch)
