“Friend of sounds? Lover of tones? Blow My Tears is anything but beats and harmonies. This is a sonic abstract art at its best”
1 Blowing Up 6:49
2 Orang Orang 4:14 3 Stampferl 4:05
4 Granz 3:15 5 Sync Dirt 6:37
8 Vong 4:55 9 Go! 4:29
10 Metal Sky 4:57 11 Obö 4:42
12 Rolling Tears 4:16 13 Palästina 4:18 SynGate Lunar | CD-r pf14
(CD-r/DDL 61:52) (V.F.) (Abstract form of EM)
I had had the ears a bit fearful, and fairly painful, after my first experiences with the universe of Pete Farn's sounds. And I have to admit that they were of marble when my eyes have scrutinized the pastel colors of this BLOW MY TEARS artworks where its abstract art releases more colors than the one of Cryptids which had a clear penchant for sci-fi. I anticipated, and rightly, an even more difficult album to access and I was not even at the end of my troubles. Before beginning, let's place the axes of this last Peter Schaefer's boldness which leads scrupulously the listener in the psychedelic lands of Zeit (Tangerine Dream) or still Interstellar Overdrive (Pink Floyd) with an approach which aims to be a book of ideas and a horn of plenty of sounds and tones in a universe of parallelism which lines the borders of a music which avoids all etiquettes. In fact this mosaic of sounds literally reminds me an orchestra of musical instruments of all sorts, as much philharmonic than of streets, which scatters through the mazes of a city where streets are so narrow that the echo of a fragment of this orchestra makes noise on the sufferings of another one. You follow me?
Strange metallic singings (a sitar disguised as a bagpipe?) open the eccentricities of this last adventure in sounds and tones of Pete Farn. Already our ears feel assaulted by the introduction of Blowing Up. Look for no rhythms nor for harmonies! The ambiences are at the top of their art with these origins of noises, of breezes or of sort of singings which drag the dusts of steel and of which the arcs of sounds are grazing the ears. The wearing of a headphone here is banned, so much the depth of the sound radiations is intense. As we move forward in the track, we indeed recognize a kind of sitar (a very metallic one) which crumbles its pinched chords in twisted ambiences where a kind of big tuba is blowing its nostalgia in some clouds of static prisms. It's slow and distressing with a direction (we speak all the same of ambiences here) which are totally diverted from their axes of passivity with abrupt movements. Violins and cellos cry in an indescribable din where a language, foreign for me, breathes life to a moment of Japanese-style tragedy in Orang Orang. I wonder how Peter Schaefer does, but he managed downright to make the nothingness grimacing and roaring. But I know why my neighbors are kind of mad at me! It's necessary to lower the volume, because the moods become unbearable for some (Hello my love!). While Stampferl manages to be a surprise with a good rhythmic approach which touches Electronica, the track crumbles with a thick cloud of iconoclastic noises in our ears. So bad! The press guide announces that there are good surprises in BLOW MY TEARS. That depends on the point of view that we are putting ourselves! The following tracks are all sound essays which are scattering tones, sounds and fragments of rhythms into unknown territories. Udung is the first track to really offer a homogeneous structure (a kind of very progressive free jazz) on its length. Afterward Go!, Obö and its delicious funeral march in a very avant-gardist New Orleans, and Palästina, a superb structure of anything I have to admit, that I have choose to be played on our radio show in Montreal, help us a little more to discover a universe where the noise of sounds and the other side of music take quite an all new dimension. For adventurous and audacious! In fact, for the eccentrics who like distancing themselves in a crowd with a thing which leaves absolutely its mark, its separation between two universes which are nevertheless so close one of the other one. I won't say it's not good, but it's definitely not my taste!
Sylvain Lupari (October 27th, 2015)
Available at SynGate Luna Bandcamp