Postcommodity – We Lost Half The Forest And The Rest Will Burn This Summer
Listening to this album, and reading some of the reviews that have already been written, I can’t help but think through it in terms of the trajectory that my own music taste has taken, especially regarding genres like noise and ambient. As was mentioned in a review for Tiny Mix Tapes, the limits of the genre always seem to be maxed out with each passing year yet of course there continue to be exciting releases coming out all the time and so we are forced to question what it is that makes this noise interesting. While these comments of saturation are not uncommon to hear from music fans, there has always been something different about the noise and ambient genres, at least in the way that they are discussed through comments about a lack of musicality and the ease of producing noise. In my own experience it was not until I went to a free jazz show and was forced to witness the actual visceral process of producing noise music that I first enjoyed and then eagerly consumed the recordings. This is probably why in listening to this album there is something unquestionably “live” that comes across to me. Though I don’t think they’re calling this a live album it would seem fitting to place this comment about live music within the context of the album’s description as “recounting the ever-cycling decay of a desert drought from the view of its flora and fauna.”
The notion of recounting music is a particularly interesting and important characteristic in this album, especially in terms of its relation to the aforementioned discussions on saturation and pushing the boundaries of a genre. There is a tendency to look for the unique qualities of a piece of music in art that makes them unquestionably of this moment, yet in my own experience it has always been less about the distinguishable nature of music that draws me to listen to something and more so the artists understanding of the conditions under which music and art are produced. To this point I think what has kept me interested in noise and experimental music is precisely how hard it is to do something deemed unprofessional or amateur with the understanding, as Postcommodity alludes to in their artist statement, that art under capitalism is meant to be productive. In listening to this album there is unquestionably something challenging about each track that would lead some to call it unfocused or inconsistent, yet it’s undoubtedly one of the most locked in albums I’ve heard this year. It’s an album that feels like it’s being caught in the act, struggling to remember how the song goes, like it lost the set list, yet it just keeps going deeper, shifting a bit and coming out ahead after waiting out a storm.
Order a 12″ copy or download We Lost Half the Forest and the Rest Will Burn This Summer via Postcommodity’s Bandcamp.
