The Catskills rise like an afterthought of God, blue with distance and old weather, their ridges holding the hush of vanished sermons, folk memory, and dream. In those eerie mountains, Washington Irving found a young nation teaching itself to haunt and be haunted. Later, the area’s numerous artist colonies came for the lush scenery, as well as that sly disturbance the mountains offer: the sense that the visible world is only half the arrangement. In that way, they anticipated surrealist thought, where landscape opens into symbol, omen, and desire, much like the woods that haunted David Lynch’s imagination: beautiful, secretive, and never entirely innocent.
New York City duo of Russ Marshalek and Laura Hajek, aka a place both wonderful and strange, work the seam where darkwave, art damage, dance-floor ache, and film-fed dread rub shoulders in a very cramped elevator. Ten years is long enough for a lot of things to rot, ripen, or get rediscovered in a shoebox. In the case of a place both wonderful and strange and their album Matter and Desire, that long gestation seems to have done something stranger and better: they let the music sit in its own fumes until it came out lean, mean, and a little bug-eyed, like it had spent a decade staring at the flowers on the wall, ‘smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.’ Perhaps those ancient mountains still have a few tricks up their sleeve, after all.
On their new single It’s Not That Bad, Muffin, they take that sensibility to the hamlet of Catskill, NY, and send it skidding into a bad-day loop, both musically and in their visuals. The fuzzed out trip-hop instrumental, channeling the heavier offerings of Ladytron, Massive Attack, Portishead, and Björk, moves like somebody trying to keep their chin up while the universe keeps slipping banana peels under their boots…then a mournful sax comes out of nowhere with a siren’s call. You can practically hear fate coughing politely into its sleeve.
The eerie video, made with Lucy Swope and Sean Dack (aka Ghost Cop), shows that any truly rotten day has its own rhythm. It folds in on itself, repeats, and mocks your attempts at dignity. The band takes cues from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, especially that marvelous ability to make time feel bent, bruised, and paranoid, with a little David Lynch in the air and tossed with a dash of Groundhog Day and the DIY rawness of The Blair Witch Project. (But who is really the dreamer?)
Watch the video for “It’s Not That Bad, Muffin” below:
The title of a place both wonderful and strange’s Matter and Desire comes from Andreas Weber’s Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. The band’s own account of the album’s slow formation is one of the best things about the project, because it carries that mix of fatigue, faith, and accidental stubbornness that often leads to records worth keeping: “We kept collecting sounds and lyrics, and at times even full songs, like our version of “I am stretched on your grave”, but there was never a reason, or really a desire, to finish this album,” they say.
Life, friendship, and the rude fact of performance kicked it back into motion. They describe finally hauling the material onstage and feeling it snap alive: “We took the stuff we’d been noodling on for half a decade and mustered up a live performance, and it stunned us how fierce, visceral and vital that show felt.”
Matter and Desire lives in the instant before change. Apocalypse appears in personal, political, and natural forms, and the band treats each one less like a grand abstract theme than a nasty practical problem. One song steps toward the light, the next eyes the ditch again. That back-and-forth gives the album its bite. People alter course only when circumstance corners them, and this record knows it.
After years of side projects, performances, Twin Peaks invocations, and the sort of artistic cross-pollination that tends to keep musicians weird in the healthiest possible way, a place both wonderful and strange have returned with a full-length that feels lived in, singed at the edges, and smart enough to keep a crooked grin on its face. It is a record for the dance floor, the dead-end street, the stalled car, the cracked mirror, and anybody who has ever muttered what the hell now and kept moving anyway.
Matter and Desire comes out April 24th on Re:Mission Entertainment. Order Here
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