(06.24.07) Legiac is the new collaborative project of the brothers Funken and Cor Bolten.The combination of Funckarma’s now legendary complex, cut-up production and Cor Bolten’s exquisite manipulation of analogue sounds should be an explosive one don’t you think? So why does the whole affair come over as slightly lackluster? Mings Feaner shares a trait with Yagya’s epic Will I Dream During the Process? album: it can be quite exhausting. Sending Orbs seem to be big fans of epic (and arguably over-long), intense works and Mings Feaner is no exception to the rule. That said, I remember feeling the same way about Yagya’s album, yet that is now a firm favourite and remains on constant rotation.
Though the sixteen tracks here include a number of short, ambient interludes the seventy odd minutes of music almost never lets up. Mings Feaner is loud, complex and often downright chaotic, but what’s strange is that despite the high production values, it seems to lack atmosphere.This isn’t evident from the start. “Coar Wacks” sees us traveling through dark tunnels to approach a huge underground metropolis, the clangs and wheezes of great machinery reverberating in the distance. Upon arrival we are greeted with a Blade Runner-esque panoply of queasy, quavering synths, dense urban atmospheres and a thwacking rhythm that is reminiscent of later Sun Electric material.
“Actind” leaves all this behind as we ascend into space and enter The Orb territory as Backside of the Moon style, nebulous pads weave into the random control-room bleeps and squelches of “Dide Skin.” Easily one of the best pieces on Mings Feaner, “Dide Skin” is a barrage of analogue ephemera with naturally textured yet typically complex and cut-up drum patterns masking sheets of luminous pads and washes that build to two separate climaxes over the course of the track.
The pacing of the album, at least initially, is spot on. The edgy and urgent “Faex Decimate,” for example, bursts onto the scene after an ambient interlude at precisely the right moment to maintain interest. What soon becomes obvious, though, is the homogoneity of much of the rest of the material; there’s a worrying “rinse and repeat” pattern that quickly emerges. Listening to individual or small batches of tracks seems to work far better than hearing the whole album in one sitting.
It’s very odd.
For every great track here there seems to be a lackluster or unnecessary one: “Hallux Abb” is a mass of alien wildlife, the squeaks and chitterings of strange creatures flitting amongst huge pools of bubbling liquid, whereas “Opaque” is an anticlimactic, noodling waste of seven and a half minutes that you’ll probably switch off so you can listen to something else. “Tretz Dizm” is a magnificent combination of curious hand-clapping, time-signature shifting rhythms and room-shaking basslines, distant Gregorian chants and more deep-space, nebula-lit washes, whilst “Pinch Era” is an over-produced, ambient cliché that evokes little and goes nowhere. “Vega Orbid” thankfully offsets the repetitive “Ibaxid'”with eastern instrumentation, more Gregorian chants, a dazzling light-show of FX and a solid rhythm. “Jed Dalton,” another highlight, is a dark and brooding explosion of ultra-deep and assertive basslines, 303 squelch, high-speed hi-hats and techno synths, whilst “Span Feaner” is little more than a revisit to the far superior title track.
The end result is that Mings Feaner comes across as less than the sum of its parts, a curious thing considering the opposite could probably be said aboutFunkarma’s own Elaztiq Bourbon 5 (released on the same label) which is a compilation album! It’s not that the material presented on Mings Feaner is bad, there’s just too much of it and too little diversity to hold your interest for seventy minutes. Mings Feaner contains a number of wonderful pieces of electronica and this is a worthy addition to any Funckarma or Sending Orbs fan’s collection, but it lacks that “essential” feeling that previous Sending Orbs releases had.
No Sending Orbs review would be complete without mentioning the artwork and here Jeroen Advocaat has excelled himself once again. A strange, spherical organic life-form covered with mechanical implants reveals itself, layer by layer over the course of ten separate images, each based on painted wax-models created by Advocaat that have been subsequently digitally manipulated. The balance of organic and manufactured elements of this entity reflect perfectly the mesh of Cor Bolten’s futuristing yet analogue material with Funckarma’s insanely processed digital input to the Legiac project. This is the most complete expression of Advocaat’s pairing of imagery to music yet seen from the label and looks simply exquisite. Desktop wallpaper, art-prints or posters please!
Mings Feaner is out now on Sending Orbs. [Purchase]
