Turzi
A

Kemado Records 2007

By Andrew McLees

The painstakingly obvious aspect of A, aside from probably being conceived while Turzi slept soundly amongst the poppy plants only to awaken and lick the sweat off the mighty caterpillar's magical sack, is that it's first and foremost an enigmatic concept album: the reoccurring A motif of the song titles; the cover's religious iconography of a man whose stoic profile contrasts a disorieting, psych-era background; the fact that each song segues coldly into the next. All of these ideas compliment an intelligent, pulsating sprawl of noise, a solid finished product and well-conceived concept, at once deeply spiritual and yet consciously disconnected.

Turzi's A is both danceable and obtuse enough to hurt your brain, breathing new life into used and abused yet equally revered musical and artistic territory without succumbing to small-minded pastiche. 

The music all borrows liberally from Europe's rich artistic and historic reservoir: the 1950s French New Wave's rejection of classical ideology—in this case, how instruments are supposed to be played—and iconoclastic spirit, '60s psychedelia's brand of noisy, hallucinatory transcendence, and Krautrock's ice-cold, calculated soundscape that took most of Europe by storm during the '70s. Turzi's reconceptualization of Krautrock, in particular, serves him well as a springboard for ideas: machines that operate themselves, long roads that lead nowhere, repetition to the point of ad nauseum, inorganic frequencies percolating as if calling out to some robotic god that may or may not exist. 

To listen to Turzi while operating heavy machinery would be a crime; this is an album that requires the listener to be sitting still, actively listening, thinking, soaking in the soundwaves and letting the machine take hold of its master. Turzi's uses devices like rich artistic history and unorthodox instrumentation to propel his sound further into our future, making for a classy, erudite afternoon of musical mindfucking.

This discourse of Turzi's A is written by Andrew McLees for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.