Martyn Bates & Max Eastley
Songs of Transformation
(Musica Maxima Magnetica eee 49, August 24 2007, Cd)

Review 1

by Keith Moline (The Wire, January 2008)

[Review of both Dissonance/Antagonistic Music & Songs of Transformation.]
At Face value, these albums, recorded two decades apart, would appear to map out the extremes of Eyeless In Gaza vocalist Bates’s musical concerns. His work veers between classicism and iconoclasm, beauty and noise, approachability and opacity. These records, however, are not the polar opposites of his aesthetic that they first appear. With Bates, there’s a thorn for every rose, a butterfly hovering above every pile of rubble.

Migraine Inducers was the fictional group name he adopted in 1979 to account for his cassette entitled Dissonance. It attracted the attention of a young fanzine editor Geoff Rushton (who later became Jhonn Balance of coil), among very few others. Packaged here with its rearrranged version made a couple of years later(known as Dissonance Americas) and a further reworking from 1994, it shows Bates indulging in a lo-fi experimentalism in the Faust/Nurse With Wound vein. While it’s a noisy, distorted mess for the most part, it turns up moments of oddly sublime beauty which his peers in UK cassette underground probably scoffed at. Bates never seems to be baiting his audience with a “listen to this if you’re hard enough” attitude. Juvenilia it may be, but it all sounds as unforced as breathing.

Songs of Transformation, recorded in 1997 but lost in the fallout of a record company reshuffle, is the work of the smooth, classy songsmith Bates, emoting coolly in a hushed tenor that at times recalls Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis. In some ways, however, it’s a darker, more difficult proposition than Migraine inducers. The sound of Max Eastley’s self-built instruments, particularly the ghostly metallic groan of his famous Arc, draws out the disturbing undercurrents of the English folk songs that comprise the disc. As with the Murder Ballads collections Bates recorded with Scorn’s Mick Harris, the collection has its pitch black moments, especially the closing pair of songs ‘Two Magicians’ and ‘Cruel Sister’. Here, the sepulchral reverb is pulled back, allowing Bates’s effective voice to insinuate the terrible secrets that lurk at the heart of the songs’ narratives.

Rewarding, but distinctly uneasy listening.

Review 2

by Paolo Bertoni (Blow Up #115, December 2007)

E’ un cerchio che va a chiudersi come un destino. Songs of Transformation avrebbe dovuto essere pubblicato dieci anni fa addirittura dalla Virgin che in quel periodo aveva preso una sbandata per l’isolazionismo, cui aveva dato ufficiale stura proprio col sampler “Isolationism” del ’94. Intanto, in quello stesso anno, Martyn Bates e M.J. Harris avevano firmato quello che autodefinirono come il manifesto del ‘post-isolazionismo’, Murder Ballads (Drift), che si sarebbe esteso a trilogia. L’etichetta che lo stampò era Musica Maxima Magnetica e proprio per l’etichetta fiorentina finalmente si illumina questo pregiato capitolo che non soltanto concettualmente presenta molti punti in comune con la collaborazione suddetta, a partire dai testi prescelti da Martyn nell’immane memoria del folklore delle isole britanniche distesi sulle elucubrazioni sonore di Max Eastley. Naturalmente nelle differenze tra Harris ed Eastley, tra l’ostinata e scabra ombrosità del primo e la perizia sperimentale colta e raffinata del secondo, stanno anche le distanze tra i lavori. L’attendista ‘If All The Young Men’ è il viatico per entrare in ‘John Barleycorn’, con la voce, di una trasparenza sovrannaturale, di Martyn che risuona in brughiere di nebbie fitte e venti scudiscianti che pure non soggiogano cuore e speranza. Ma non vengono trascurati episodi in cui il circostante si fa fragorosamente minaccioso, ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ o ‘Two Magicians’, una natura che non rinuncia a rilanciare un monito che rimarrà inascoltato, ed allo stesso modo straordinariamente convincenti sono i frangenti in cui le melodie vocali si fanno più definite ed animate da ancestrali spiriti, nelle splendide ‘The Red Herring’ e ‘Nottamun Town’.