- Exquisite
unreleased pain
themed track
Audio
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'Unseen Forces' Information
Vague Terrain is pleased to announce "Unseen Forces", the debut CD and DVD by Sagan, a quartet comprised of musicians Blevin Blectum, J Lesser, and Jon Leidecker and video artist Ryan Junell. The album, titled "Unseen Forces: Audio", commences on a suitably cosmic scale with bombastic space-prog complete with triumphant analogue melodies recalling the birth of distant galaxies, or early 70s Vangelis records about the birth of distant galaxies. Magnifying the lost-in-a-private-world-of-their-own tendencies which have marked both Lesser and Blectum from Blechdom releases in the past but considerably more ambitious in scope, "Unseen Forces" contains multitudes: cranky computers, chirpy helium speed loops, big lumbering rock drums, spiky metal guitar leads, crumbling towers of gabber stomp, pastoral piano meanderings, field recordings from bird hospitals, abrupt tempo collapses, and shivering synthesizers. It's a heady, epic trip that is likely to please the sky people and stupefy the earth people. In pre-album release focus group sessions, listeners mentioned Hawkwind, and complained of organs dissolving, being transformed into glass, and wormhole-induced nausea.
Expanding an already sprawling opus, Ryan Junell's beautifully shot 40 minute music film, titled "Unseen Forces: Video", stages a hilarious sequence of vignettes from the history of science to Sagan's music. Sidestepping any expectations of high falutin' experimental art video in favor of slapstick narrative, these wryly subtitled re-enactments of important historical breakthroughs come off as a weird hybrid of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and Led Zeppelin's "The Song Remains the Same". Commencing with a turtlenecked Carl Sagan lookalike invoking the sun, Junell's film proceeds to romp anachronistically across history in a playful homage to "Cosmos": The Big Bang is restaged by a flashlight-wielding modern dance troupe (played by real life astronomy buffs recruited online), whose cosmic choreography goes largely unnoticed by their glib, uncomprehending audience. The Greek Rationalist discovery that air is a substance is refigured as a gay pick up technique in an ice cream parlour, with Matmos' M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel playing Empedocles and Pausanias. In the final scene, married couple Bevin and J re-enact the courtship of the Curies and their discovery of radiation as a Jerry Lewis-style tragicomedy. For the truly gluttonous, the hybrid DVD also contains 9 shows with over 6 hours of music in the popular mp3 format.
From their first beginnings as a band, Sagan have always merged electronic music with video work, and the combined oomph of "Unseen Forces" on CD and DVD delivers a one-two punch of sound and vision that is funny, ambitious, and deeply weird.
Blevin Blectum was one half of the late lamented electronic duo Blectum from Blechdom; her newest solo album is forthcoming on Praemedia. J Lesser also makes records as Lesser for labels like Matador and Irritant; he is currently co-owner of six birds. Jon Leidecker makes records as Wobbly for Tigerbeat 6; he crashes software for a living. Ryan Junell has directed videos for bands like Gravy Train!!!, Spoon, and The Soft Pink Truth; he is currently at work on a political documentary.
2008