[PREMIERE/LP REVIEW] MAU- Safari Entrepeneur + FREE DOWNLOAD OF 1 Track
A muted disaffection, a cold affair with the world where we whisper sounds of our discontentment into tumblers of scotch–that’s the sound of our generation. We are a disconnected generation. We look at the world and it stares back placidly as it shrugs–it’s forgotten who we even are. And we sit in our bedrooms and bar stools made of ‘Cold, Cheap Leather’ and we rub our hand down the side of the furniture hoping for a spark of a new feeling. But everything feels like cliches wrapped in necrotic kisses that lure us in like some ill-fated breath of life.
I know every centimeter of my world, but that doesn’t mean I exist in it. That little gash in the side of the stool was where I, in a fit of feeling, threw it against a wall and screamed. Those scratches on my bed from the moments when I dug into the backboard and attempted to hold onto being present in the moment, to have anything in the present, as you fucked me. Those blemishes on the artificial surface are the stories I told with lovers come and gone, like ghosts that gallivanted on my genitalia. We wanted each new ‘Epic Start’ to be different, but it’s the same stories repeated until no one can muster the enthusiasm to pretend it’s some kind of gospel. So we swirl our scotch on the rocks in our hands and suddenly it’s our life on the rocks staring back at us.
That need to break free, out of barren landscapes and into pioneering soundscapes is the focus of MAU’s new album. What are we capable of to bust a move and flee from a suffocating reality? What kind of voice will we have? What kind of sounds will threaten to either drown us out or amplify our primal cry? These are very 2K15 sound questions to ask, which is all about the bold experimentation into risky spaces; or as Disco Naivete puts it in regards to Arca: to create a soundscape unheard and unrivaled, that just washes over you.
Arca, FKA Twigs, Burial–all purveyors of the 2K15 sound– are certainly MAU”s contemporaries on the scene. They are all artists aware of our status as disconnected souls in need of some spark of emotion to set us alight. They swim in seas of sorrow, but liberaqte us not by grounding us on some kind of plane of reality that reeks familiar–our reality has long proven fucked, we are all ‘Children Playing Adults’–but rather by letting us dissipate over disparate thoughts in our mind and dodgy districts in cities we’ve never been. And we freefloat, following our intuition as it calls us to bodies on beds and lovers that we feel the need to pool ourselves around.
In the 2k15 sound we’re all Safari Entrepreneur[s]: apathetic apparitions with a secret side avidly searching for an opportunity connected to arms that pull us in, that give us a home, that tell us we’re really not as much of a ‘love mess’ as we think we’ve turned out to be.
Which brings us back to the question of what are we capable of to achieve that? MAU’s ‘Cheetah’ would say pretty much anything. The entire LP, but in particular this track, is acutely aware of the hunger drive that restarts at first heartbeat. The music plays neither the victim nor fancies the fantasy that it’s the victimizer. In MAU’s world, as much of the 2K15 sound, the reality is mountains upon mountains in the continental shelves of our hearts more complex than that. It’s a dog heart eat dog heart world out there; and when presented with the opportunity, when tasting blood spill from a body messily re-pumping it for the first time again, sometimes you’ll bust a few skulls to get the fuck out. You’re nothing but a bag of bones swimming in white noise currently, but you hear a signal calling your name and it’s telling you, “I’ve got flesh to coat your skeleton”. It becomes, then, like a beacon call.
It’s a transmission of hope. The only problem is you’ve got an adversary standing in your way. Perhaps they are someone you love/d. Perhaps they are someone it’d kill to lose, if you could feel what it was like to get re-murdered. But you can’t and a safari entrepreneur wouldn’t pass up the opportunity, even if it comes at the cost of disappearing another heart. Dog heart eat dog heart world, after all. Your blood spilled is my escape.
That journey out, out from the disconnected spaces and into a life of bete-noir eyes and a tribal stomp through dance safaris to rid you of the curse that you’re under is the heart of MAU’s new album. And it’s that insular, introverted thematic, carried throughout its twelve track runtime, that makes it a ride that can run as rabidly for your attention as expertly as releases by MAU’s 2k15 sound contemporaries. With the notable exception of ‘Off To Berlin’. Look, I get it and why it’s included in the LP; but I’m never going to be comfortable with the stories of women told by straight men. They’re never accurate and the feminist in me is always alerted to the elements of mansplaining that rot the core of what could be an otherwise great song (for the record: I have the same problem with Josef Salvat’s ‘Shoot and Run’ released this year).
Most of Safari Entrepreneur is a genderless LP, because it’s a generational album, and that’s one of its strengths.A generational album proclaims my story has universal reach. Because the pain we all share, caused by blighted economies that impoverish us and cultures that grow fearful and jingoistic, is so pervasive as to hang in the air like smog and to ‘nourish’ our body like poisoned tap water. My need to flee to Berlin, to be a fucking pioneer, to be real, to feel real, to relish in the fact that just believing in that means I can already feel the excitement start to rush through and flush my genitalia with a resurgent horniness for life— is a story all of us in this disconnected generation can (re)connect with. A Safari Entrepeneur is a zie (not a he/she), a hir (not him/her), it’s the role model we need to find in ourselves. So dance, motherfuckers, to a new life. Whoever the fuck you are, whomever you love.
This is an independent release from the band.
SO PLEASE SUPPORT MAU BY PURCHASING THEIR LP HERE.
CATCH A FREE DOWNLOAD OF STELLAR SINGLE ‘COLD, CHEAP LEATHER‘ HERE.
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