Greatest Heads (lp) - Al Karpenter - Vinyl LP Record (Arrives in 50 days)

Released by Hegoa Records and Night School Records, Greatest Heads is the fourth album by the radical Basque-Berlinesque group Al Karpenter. A deconstruction of structured “rock” music, here Al Karpenter re-imagine “the band” to explore the intersection between free music, afro-beat, the avant-garde, and gonzo rock.

If Theodore Adorno wrote “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” in 1949, Al Karpenter attempts to answer the difficult question today: what kind of music can be made in the face of genocide? Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini y Mattin respond to the planet’s descent into a vortex of hate by creating ecstatic music — a protest sound bursting with multiple musical languages and glossaries, full of overlapping histories and thrilling tensions.

Greatest Heads posits a plurality of musics both in opposition and intertwined: Al Karpenter play rock instruments pulled apart in the studio in post-production. Distorted rhythm chunks are bit-crushed and dissipated, segments of freedom oppressed by waves of sound invading from every direction. The interplay between the chief instrumentalists and renowned sound artist Mattin creates something akin to ESP freedom-seekers Cro Magnon playing in Miles Davis’ early 70s groups, or the Los Angeles Free Music Society tightening into a clenched fist of plunderphonics and runaway percussion.

“We Are All Karpenters” opens Greatest Heads with the most straightforward refrain of the record, accompanied by a band that soon crashes into eruption, imagining Sun City Girls in full free rock mode. The modulating synth sound soon pulls the band into its wake, creating a spine-chilling climax of distorted sound, made fully ecstatic with mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s attention to detail.

On “Izugarrizko Buruak (Greatest Heads)”, Matilla intones in Basque over a mangled distorto-beat. “A Brand New Astraphobia” creates a black space for a heavily processed guitar to explode before falling to earth at night, a gentle figure serenading the coming end.

On Side B, the band is masticated by a brutal phaser, squelching and stretching the music into new territories. The overt message of “Stop The Genocide!” is besieged by violence before “Worm City” aggressively samples the ghosts of soul music, mixing in noise bursts, prepared piano, and abstracted sound. Epic closer “Perfect Love” feels like beat poetry performed on a burnt world — still grasping for community, for home, for some sort of human love. A mad love, then; an angry love fueled by solidarity and collaboration.

The band’s cascading layers of references and polyglottal musics attempt to create the perfect lover — alive with rage and disorienting ecstasy: Al Karpenter.

Tracklist

1. We Are All Karpenters
2. Mundo Chabola
3. Izugarrizko Buruak (Greatest Heads)
4. A Brand New Astrophobia
5. The Most Grudgeful Lie
6. Tout Avant De Devenir Rein
7. Stop the Genocide!
8. Worm City
9. Death Song
10. Perfect Love

Label: Night School | Origin: Holland