Product Info
2LP is clear vinyl, limited to 500.
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To approach a text explaining Monodrama is to take on a genuine challenge. Like Faust when ordered by Mephistopheles to "invent words, now that ideas fail you", we are bereft of signifiers to describe Monodrama's music - they are the happiest anomaly of current Spanish music, a band with no apparent reference points in our local scene. We fall into dizzying spirals, trapped by the weeds, abusing prefixes, invented idioms and imagined anglicisms, muddying the waters with terms like Chillwave, nu-Jazz, Avant Garde, Ambient, Post Rock, Synthpop, Downbeat" Endless labels which strive to define the boundaries of a terrain which really stretches, ruptures the limits between genres, textures, aesthetics and idioms arising from the jumble of instrumental music, abstract electronica, contemporary jazz, or, simply, improvised music. Monodrama is three musicians from Madrid, classically formed, dissident of spirit, wild and futuristic of surmise, independent but united by the hive mind that is this project: Alberto Brenes (drums, percussion and sound design), David Sancho (piano, Rhodes, synths) and Mauricio Gomez (tenor sax, keyboards). Hyperactive members of the contemporary jazz scene, you can find them collaborating with La Resistencia Ensemble or with pianist Moisos P. Sanchez in his acclaimed "Unbalanced: concerto for ensemble" album, nominated for the Latin Grammys in 2019. When they play within the boundless space that is Monodrama, what emerges is a project philosophically and aesthetically aligned with Jazz, but imbued with textural experimentation and electronica, as well as a creative non-conformism which situates them in a no-place - unclassifiable, unique and fascinating. Perceived from the outside, Monodrama is an indecipherable mechanism, functioning with a watchmaker's precision, somehow eluding the worn paths and pavements of known styles and genres to lay down new and unique trails. The forward motion (or sideways leap, depending on your vantage point) that acts as the first principle of the machine that is Monodrama's music is not a desire to rupture or a collision of opposites - it is not a needless disruption of the norm. There is, here, no show of strangeness, no iconoclasm, no attempt to break down established canons, no cerebral intent to fuse styles, instead a freedom from academicism. Monodrama is a display of simple free will, free from any need to wipe out anybody's prints or to explode the foundations of anything. It is an uninhibited exploration of untouched landscapes, skirting and probing the most distant margins of free and experimental music, uncalm, gaze always to that which is yet to come, a landscape usually untrusted, regarded as intransitable, and barely touched by Spain's musical travellers. Looking to the always unjust, imprecise task of finding points of connection, however ephemeral or imprecise, with other artistic entities that help us define the musical parameters within.
Tracklist
1.
A BLUE FLAME 06:18
2.
EVERYTHING IN ITS WRONG PLACE 07:04
3.
LEVITATION 04:05
4.
THE HUNT 07:35
5.
GOLDEN AGE OF THE EYE 04:02
6.
STATEMENT PART 1: WOLVES ARE AT THE DOOR 03:42
7.
STATEMENT PART 2: FIGHT! 03:45
8.
HOBO 06:05
9.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD 02:50
10.
INNER DANCE 06:10
11.
BIG HOPE 08:43
12.
SARABANDE 10:18
13.
PAHOEHOE 05:24