Martyn Bates
Leitmotif
(Hand/Eye H-E Moon 4.2, June 22, 2005, Cdr-Ep (100 copies))

Review 1

by Mark Coyle (theunbrokencircle.co.uk, 2005)

Month four also brings a very welcome bonus disc from Martyn Bates, ex-leader of Eyeless in Gaza and key driving force in the development of experimental acoustic music since the eighties. Before the concept of wyrd folk had even been envisaged, Martyn was making ‘murder ballads’ that prefigured the idea and took it into personal exploration. Although a bonus disc, this has as much care and attention paid to it as the other CDr this month and comes with a thematic aspect integral to it’s creation.

The piece is called ‘Leitmotif’ and weaves two aspects together, first a pre-17th traditional song ‘The Twa Sisters / Minorie’ learned from Ewan McColl’s version that in the words of Martyn combines “both malevolent and benign characteristics.” Woven in between restatements and evolutions of this song are instrumental sections that aim to evoke the tragic romance of mankind’s desire to become our own god at the heart of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein was a book that talked of the desire to transcend the emptiness of human existence by becoming gods ourselves, creating perfection. The inevitable imperfection of our heretical creation reveals our own folly and ignorance, the lack of grace at the heart of our being and a message against the quest of alchemists (or now modern scientists). However more than this it is a romance of man with himself and of the monster’s desire to become us as we try to become god.

It appears then that this release in it’s alternating sections and explorations of both positive and negative, in the song and in the allusion to Frankenstein is concerned with the duality at the heart of humanity, the unresolvable struggle that drives us to sustain. Whether this is an adequate answer to the puzzle Martyn sets in his sleeve notes, does not matter for the music speaks for itself. Combining traditional ‘folk song’ with dread filled instrumentals of silent heresy that tell of crumbling manors, of rejected crying women and of chemicals bubbling, on the way to creating life that should never be.