There is a certain nostalgic element to radio made up of fantastic possibilities that most of us just can’t understand anymore (tuning in to the universe at large, receiving sounds from the ether), even if our world is even stranger than it was throughout most of the twentieth century. Still, the specter of magical machines haunts the screens of our netbooks as they produce all kinds of new and disturbing symbols. We rely on what we’ve seen or heard before to interpret them, and yet many times they manage to elude our comprehension, leading to a newborn sense of discovery and awe. The collage is its ruling principle, a technique meant to erase limits and provoke imaginary twists and turns, and it frees the listener in the sense that one no longer needs to ‘choose a path’, in reality imposed by the technique itself, for there is no evident road, and one can walk freely, one can finally close one’s eyes and get lost. After all, like the surrealists used to say, the only way to see is with the eyes held tightly shut.
In 13 Houses and the Mermaid, one can’t help but lose every reference one has to identify things, trying to make out the meaning of the twelve houses arranged like a clock on the CD cover, spinning a thousand times per minute to bring infinity near enough to grasp, thinking that this incredibly fast collage inevitably pushes the listener beyond the edges of understanding, entering the loud and powerful rooms of a thirteenth house. Its mystery is not a secret: it is within, and it builds up as we move along, tuning in and out of the ether and listening to what it has to say. Sweet piano melodies echo in the forefront while static and digital fallout contaminate their clarity of form, as voiced by the remains of unknown signals. Together, they tell a story of noise and images of electric posts that clearly cut the sky, merging all sorts of transmissions with the movement of the clouds above. The narrative is made for you, and you only; to look at heaven and listen to its cracked, distorted longings is to give form to your own feeling of displacement within the soundscape of muffled piano, alarms, and tunes long lost in the falling of a cable.
In a way, the whole of the album is like a magical device, elegantly and delicately crafted with polaroids and a seemingly hand-made box that bears all sorts of stamps that override whatever documentary value the photographs have. It is like one of those mad machines made by magician apprentices everywhere, full of parts and notes that always lead to just blank paper – they are useless, and so they are amazingly effective. In this respect, this is an artwork that will always have a place inside some loop within one’s head, changing over time and changing how we listen, because it points at all kinds of places and none at all… it points towards the labyrinth mass of incoming data everywhere at once, and yet happening only in the radius of one’s perception. The only suggestion I can make is to listen to it every now and then, just to find yourself utterly lost in its web of possible meanings. Perhaps that is the leap of faith one needs to change, to enter the thirteenth house at last. (David Murrieta)
a closer listen 