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Mount Vernon Astral Temple, "Musick That Destroys Itself"
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas! A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forward or backward. Drew Mulholland recorded this album of ritualistic electronics in celebration of our first palindromic year since, er, 1991. The album was recorded starting at 20:02 on 20/02 2002. Each track is 20:02 long. Get it? Pretty neato, huh? Ten animals I slam in a net.Mulholland has changed the name of his musical project from the relatively nifty Mount Vernon Arts Lab to the decidedly more turgid Mount Vernon Astral Temple, which should come as no surprise considering his new home on Threshold House. The Moon Musick Boys seem to have precipitated this sudden name change, and have also exerted an influence the new musical direction. For this album, Mount Vernon Aquatic Synagogue abandon the charming retro-futurist trappings that informed previous releases, which sounded a lot like BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Well, apparently Mulholland has decided to drop the Joe Meek posturing and get serious. Lived on decaf, faced no devil.
The new sound involves overblown prog synthesizers arpeggiating into the stratosphere, with sheets of heavy distortion and gale-force winds. Long story short, he's gone completely Kraut. Along with the new sound comes some annoying conceptual posturing. The daft liner notes by Mark Pilkington of Fortean Times drone on about silly time portals and then claim that the rituals done to create these pieces were "chronological terrorism." Huh? Wasn't this "Musick Cures Time" thing already done on Coil's Time Machines? How much of Coil's act is Mulholland planning to borrow? Was it a car or a cat I saw? All of this palindromic ponderousness comes to naught in the end, as the pieces on Musick That Destroys Itself are not the same forward as backward. I know this for a fact. I ripped the tracks to wave files and reversed them. Oh, and the "musick" doesn't destroy itself. If it did, I wouldn't have been able to buy the album.
So, all of this useless conceptual baggage aside, I have no complaint with the music. Both pieces are very similar, although the second track is infinitely more galactic. The synthesizers sound like the wet dream of that keyboard-playing midget from Hawkwind. Big, hefty slabs of Stonehenge siroccos sweep across a barren lunar landscape, with explosions of analogue spraying out into the stars. There is a certain cyclical logic to the structuring of the tracks, much in the same mold as Tangerine Dream's early sidelong compositions. While not perfectly palindromic, I must admit that there is a certain Rorscharch blob symmetry to the tracks. The first pressing also comes with a bonus CD of a live performance, possibly recorded at the Megalithomania! event last year. It's very tasty indeed. While I feel a certain nostalgia for the earlier sound, the new Mount Vernon Android Testicles is certainly a lot of fun as well. Let's hope that for future albums, Drew Mulholland will find some more convincing theoretical garbage to justify his music. Dogma in my hymn: I am God. This review is not a palindrome.
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