indignant senility

Plays Wagner - Part Two (Limited Vinyl Edition)

*Limited Second part to this amazing set exploring the ghostly echoes emanating from old Wagner recordings, slowly disintegrating into a haunted landscape of frayed tape loops and gradually exposed vapour trails of forgotten sounds and memories...so good*
Following on from where its equally enigmatic predecessor left off, Plays Wagner Part 2 finds Pat Maherr returning with another volume of dark, phantasmagorical soundscapes. These somnolent, dreamlike passages bear all the hallmarks of that most overused of buzzwords: hauntology, and there's little avoiding comparisons between Indignant Senility and one the movement's best known affiliates - Leyland Kirby. Plays Wagner is in a sense a 2nd generation hauntological work, arriving some time after the term was first ported from Derrida over to music journalism, and so whether it be by the artist's implication or the listener's inference there's an unavoidable intertextuality evident in this music. In the crackling vinyl tracts of Philip Jeck, the evaporating tape reels of William Basinski and the haunted ballrooms brought to life by The Caretaker you can hear the virulent spread of a fictionalised brand of nostalgia, and Maherr's work channels a similar language, exhuming dusty old Wagner recordings and exoosing eroded treatments of them onto cassette for a further degree of separation from the source. The material at the heart of this record seems incredibly remote and spectral, residing somewhere within the muffled hum and warbling pitches of Maherr's discolouring analogue equipment. By the time these sounds reach our ears, Wagner has long since gone and something very dark and elusive has taken his place. Essential Purchase.