For all my to hell with the constructs! posturing, I don’t like long tracks. Music means rhythm and rhythm means at least a bit of repetition, so any track shorter than a minute better make up in girth what it lacks in length. (That came out wrong.) But much longer than Mars Volta’s “L’Via L’Viaquez” (over 12 minutes, if you don’t settle for the amputated radio edit) and I start getting the urge to subdivide the living room.
Enter Inconceivable by Magical Unicellular Music, or V.O.M., which I take to be the acronym in Russian. The release is a single, 40+ minute track, “recorded on 08.08.08 (dauy [sic] of Russia-Georgia-Osetian war started) at Snegiri studio in Moscow. It implements not a regular groove only but a big architectural form of dynamic development created together with noise wizard Lampi from Minsk, famous Bimka from St-Petersburg, playing with his fingers on the naked electronics boards and Bad Seed on sax.”
The piece begins as a slow guitar march: psychedelia for minimalists. It’s possible that the sax is reminiscent of Lost Highway, which would be why it conjures a film soundtrack. Either way I see career thugs preparing for something big: a bank heist, maybe? I want to like it, but this act is simply too long. If you’re one of those who really thinks that “music means rhythm and rhythm means at least a bit of repetition,” this definitely is your thing.
At roughly 23:00 things take a kinetic turn. The beat shifts from a march to a run: the heist has dissolved and the thugs are fleeing the scene, every man for himself? If you’re still with us, the spaces gradually begin to fill over the next ten minutes or so until the clutter becomes delicious and delirious and unsustainable. This way a consummately unconventional track dissolves with a bit of convention, a crowded and urgent jam that simply needs to end. I can’t say I don’t like it, but it could all be several minutes shorter.
For those of you looking for something a bit more discrete, try a couple of unvetted clips below, or head over to their Myspace page for streaming, download, and narratives like this one:
One shouldn’t mix V.O.M. with most of the psychedelic culture, that is frequently filled with memory loss – V.O.M. suggests remembering. Remembering as much as one can, bit by bit. This is true, primitive music.Several bands simultaneously function in the context of the Magical Unicellular Music project in different cities – V.O.M. III and V.O.M. V in Minsk, V.O.M. IV in Moscow.
