We are proud to present Gang Gang Dance's much anticipated second full length release entitled God's Money. With God's Money Gang Gang Dance creates a modern music which reorients the palette of electronic music into an organic context, manipulating sound, rhythm and melody in an almost mercurial manner. Painstakingly recorded over the course of a year at Junkyard Audio Salvage, the band utilized whatever means were available to them to craft their sound: drums of all shapes, sizes and circuits, various keyboards and synthesizers, midi-triggering guitar scenarios, vocals reconfi gured via a guitar effect pedal and even the occasional aluminum chair. Blending their hypnotic rhythms into a highly structured compositional style or soaring in the lofty heights of practiced improvisation, this recording follows in the footsteps of the bands previous output, all while marking new ground. In between writing and recording God's Money GGD spent the last year playing to packed houses in NYC, Europe and on the road with Animal Collective. Exploding with an energy & confi dence rarely seen these days and coupling it with such a heightened level of musicianship the band has turned even the most casual of spectators into full on believers. With magazines such as The Wire, The Village Voice, I.D. & XLR8R having already run features on the band, the press is falling into the ranks of the converted. God's Money is the height of GGD's uncompromising sonic pursuit which has spanned the better part of the band's fi ve year history. Some of this can be gleamed from previous groups the members have been in, including Cranium, Actress, Ssaab Songs & Angel Blood. Though God's Money may be interpreted as the band's high-water mark of sorts it is much more the raising of the tide as they continually to push the boundaries of the palette of sound itself with no sign waning.
Review by Jo-Ann Greene
Thankfully, the Internet has boundless space, all the better to cope with the twaddle bouncing around the Web about Gang Gang Dance and their latest album. Perhaps people are somewhat baffled that the band is as much a live unit as a studio concern, thus throwing off musical perceptions. Freak-folk, art-noise, tribal dub, you name a whacked-out hybrid description, and it's been applied by someone to this group. Take 'em off-stage, though, and what you really have is an ambient electronic unit that's no more or less experimental than anything coming out on, say, the DiN label. "God's Money I" and "God's Money V," for instance, are both built around tribal drum rhythms, the former with wailing vocals on top, the latter in a more experimental, almost Tetsu Inoue mode. "God's Money IX," in contrast, rolls with thunder and is a much darker piece, while "God's Money VII" is filled with ambient textures. "Before My Voice Fails" reaches ethereal proportions, while both "Untitled (Piano)" and "Egowar" feature gorgeous synth passages. Even the noisy, fractured "Glory in Itself/Egyptian" has a melody lurking within. The most challenging number, however, is "Nomad for Love (Cannibal)," where shards of musical bits and pieces are only loosely woven together. The Gang's rhythms and textures are intriguing, and much more accomplished in sound than their previous lo-fi efforts. What throws the group for a loop however, are Liz Bougatsos' vocals: chanted, singsong babbled, howled, and wailed in turn. Her presence almost solely pulls the Gang out of the ambient world and into another far more disturbing and experimental galaxy entirely. Without her, God's Money would be a haunting journey through an ever-shifting electronic world, where textures and rhythms are explored to oftentimes great effect. With her, the musical experience is far more difficult, as she cuts across the grain of the atmospheres and moods, suggesting the group will never sit comfortably in any niche but its own.
Gang Gang Dance
God's Money
[The Social Registry; 2005]
Rating: 8.6
There are those who make "noise," and then there are elegant, shadowy troupes cobbling ghost languages and fractured dub into undulating biospheres. Last year, Excepter's KA provided a backbeat for spinning infinitives on rusty fire escapes. And now, on their second full-length, fellow New Yorkers Gang Gang Dance have created an equally powerful record: If KA functioned as a nighttime talisman, consider God's Money its daytime companion-- music for brightly lit graffiti-scoured parks. Despite their differences, Excepter and GGD both remove restrictive compositional components and turn electro-acoustic sprawl into a generative act. It's Throbbing Gristle's "Hot on the Heals of Love" reconfigured as a deck of shards.
God's Money's exuberant decay isn't a surprise; Gang Gang Dance have been intriguing ever since the ex-Cranium, Angelblood, Ssab Songs, and Actress members deconstructed their first denouement five years ago. But despite the linked evil-eye cover art between this and last year's Fusetron gathering, this collection jump-starts a new chapter of their sonic braille: Exit distended Ono, enter jubilant rebirth.
Recorded over the course of a year at Junkyard Audio Salvage, the nine tracks are mixed smoothly, and feel woven together. Each bit has a home, like paint spread thickly across a canvas instead of in globs dropped here and there. Instrumentally, drums (hand to electronic), MIDI, synth, keys, and treated vocals gel like a percussive centipede darting through the murk of the East River.
While the quartet act as a single entity, vocalist Lizzi Bougatsos emerges as a legitimate frontwoman: She knows her Living Theater and Picabia and feels at times like Karen O performing Kurt Schwitters' "Ur Sonata". Each track finds her ranting distantly, humming internally, and intoning over that aforementioned fractal backdrop of gentle nursery-rhyme cascades and quicksilver jaunts stitched with tiny cylindrical pulses.
In a few cases, her lyrics aptly describe her function. For instance, on "Egowar", which features rain sticks turned into pan flutes by fauns, she "juggles mime with laughter." Elsewhere, "Glory In Itself" drops a "shiver of mint or rotten hay," a suitable descriptor of the album's atmosphere, before a tyrannosaurus guitar and glimmered new wave factory synth soon to be torn asunder.
It's difficult to diagram a textual storyline, but opener God's Money I (Percussion)" launches us in medias res into tribal echos, snaps, bass de-tuned drum, and vocalizations (one voice further in the distance and the other up front counterpoint). There's a break at the end that recalls a drumline circling a drain, before GGD stop on a dime and saunter in opposing directions. The album never suspends movement: It continues to pulse and breath even in its quietest moments. And in each piece, there exists an amazing freeform beauty as well as a great sense of rhythm and melody hidden within ostensible chaos.
So I'm speaking in heightened terms, sure. There's flat out so much hype in my neighborhood-- some of it deserved, quite a bit of it completely off-the-mark-- and Brooklyn's baggage has been so sweatily decried/rehashed everywhere from the tiniest zine to the Better Homes & Gardens recipe section. That kind of overkill makes me nervous, because Gang Gang Dance are one of those bands puritanical cynics avoid just because the name's dropped so regularly (and OK, they're spotted chilling with Chloe Sevigny on the downtown society page). But, whatever the art-world association or hipster evaluation points, God's Money runs laps around all those noisy minions fucking with effects pedals at their feet.
-Brandon Stosuy, April 14, 2005
|
