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Mothlite - The Flax of Reverie
http://www.mothlite.com/ www.myspace.com/mothlite http://www.southern.net/
Mothlight was one of the earliest films of avant garde director Stan Brakhage. It consisted of four minutes of film which had had bits of insects and foliage glued to it. The band Mothlite are as strange as the film after which they are probably named. This, their debut, is a weirdly evocative album which manages to utilise all the tricks of the studio, coupled with the employment of haunting strings, choral madrigals and delicate woodwind. Along the way there are touches of late era Talk Talk and Pink Floyd and then some John Coltrane-style jazz. It really is as odd as it sounds. It is also magnificent.
Parts of the album are astonishingly uplifting – wide open and bright. Like a child skipping through the glorious sunshine. Then we seem to be suddenly faced with a claustrophobically dark psychosis, as if the chid has suddenly imagined that they are about to be kidnapped by malevolent tree spirits.
Somehow the disparate, dissonant elements hang together to create a cohesive
That there name was inspired by a film is no surprise. The album is cinematic in scope. Although if this were a soundtrack it would be for a film that made Brakhage’s experiments with glue and dead lepidopterans seem run of the mill and a perfectly normal way to go about making cinema.
It is an extraordinarily odd and an extraordinarily good record.
Words: Stuart Crosse