Mort Aux Vaches

This edition of Mort Aux Vaches focuses on isolationist ambient/drone, collecting some shorter performances from like-minded artists Flying Saucer Attack, Main, and White Winged Moth. Running roughly 15 minutes each, the three artists toe the musical equivalent of the Maginot Line, but never surpass the weighty expectations that their previous achievements bring to mind. Of the three, FSA's Dave Pearce comes the closest. At the time this was recorded (September 25, 1997), FSA had recently returned from hiatus, entering what Pearce called its second phase. This was characterized by a greatly decreased focus on the distortion that FSA built their house on, and a greater emphasis on the neo-folk acoustica that blossomed on New Lands. Over four tracks, Pearce's pastoral guitar struggles for primacy over fuzzed-out musique concrete backgrounds evoking, if nothing else, a cloudy afternoon just after a thunderstorm. Main presents a soundscape that seems largely improvised (on a laptop?), with found sounds and other concrete elements such as droning bells, malfunctioning mixers, and other clichés of the genre. White Winged Moth, the solo project of Thela's Dean Roberts, sounds similar to Main's track. Utilizing only electric guitars, Roberts scrapes and abuses his guitar in a manner similar in places to Derek Bailey's Aida, sounding like a person discovering that a guitar can make noises in ways that do not necessarily involve plucking or strumming. Roberts' contributions are, on the whole, uncompelling. Special note should be made of the excellent packaging. A three-panel cardboard foldout forms a board game that appears to be similar to Battleship but with a Star Trek aesthetic. And of course, like all of the entries in the Mort Aux Vaches series, this one is limited to 1,000 hand-numbered copies.