Eamon the Destroyer – "A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled" (BS057)
A remix album of the excellent Eamon The Destroyer album, and this is a rare thing as I actually prefer it to the original, and I enjoyed the original a great deal. A Small Blue Car… is another overwhelming success of a release taking the experimental and layering it with blankets of alternative pop electronica warmth
[Monolith Cocktail]
Bearsuit is a close-knit community of musicologists and risk-takers who love to push the envelope beyond traditional musical forms. A very interesting and, as always with Bearsuit, an occasional challenging listen. [The album] gives you an excellent cross section of the state of today’s electronic and experimental music scene
[It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine]
A Small Blue Car – Re-Made/Remodelled is a source of pleasure, not only because it’s genuinely interesting, but simply because it exists. A great experimental work. An absolute triumph!
[Aural Aggravation]
Great album!
[Louder Than War]
The fabulous “Nothing Like Anything” by Like This Parade caresses the listener’s ears, its pseudo-orchestral treatment by Senji Niban will stress how impeccably the coherence of “A Small Blue Car” is preserved here. Here’s a vehicle that’s able to run in every make, in every guise and with every trim: an all-terrain type of transport to carry passengers beyond the pale
[DMME.net]
[“Tomahawk Den” - Societe Cantine Remix].It's the kind of methamphetamine of weird songs. What's he doing? ! I don't know but it's fascinating! A sort of song in there but the structures are perplexing and challenging and intriguing... Bearsuit Records – really worth checking out. There's some really great music on there...
[Club Integral Radio Show – Resonance FM]
Awesome stuff!
[From One Extreme To Another]
Nicely unsettling [“Nothing Like Anything” – Like This Parade Remix]
[Wireless Warbles, CRMK]
If you like your music a little abstract and interesting then this is the one for you – it's called “A Small Blue Car – Re-made/Re-modelled”. A fascinating remix album from Bearsuit Records. Very good indeed...
[Aural Delights]
“A Small Blue Car – Re-made/Re-modelled” – I played a load of remixes off of this last week which were absolutely brilliant! At Bearsuit Records everything is always of brilliant quality – and that was [“The Tide To Steal Away” Remix] Harold Nono - one of the old guard – putting in a tremendous remix there. Wonderful LP!
[Phil Vickery – In-tune, BCfm]
“The Conjuring Stops” - Andrei Rikichi Remix – from the excellent Bearsuit Records. A remix album featuring (amongst others) Like This Parade, Societe Cantine, Michael V. West and Ememe. All good stuff!
[Velvet Sheep]
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Eamon The Destroyer – “A Small Blue Car – Re-made/Re-modelled” (BS057)
A fresh approach to a Scottish pastiche master’s vehicle finds him on the road to obscure raptures.
If you invite friends over for a playdate and tell them to bring along some toys, rest assured: quite a lot of your own things may get ruined yet combining of everyone’s favorite trinkets can produce interesting results. That’s exactly what happened when Eamon The Destroyer asked kindred spirits to have a field day with his "A Small Blue Car" album soon after its issue, which led not only to the record’s Eno-esque postmodernism in sonic terms but also to wondrous deconstruction of the source material. On the one hand, this was not a positive turn of events because, even though the original recordings’ complex collages allowed creative input from his fellow artists, their remixes removed the elemental intimacy Eamon’s aural mosaics exuded; on the other hand, there’s fresh conceptuality in the reshuffled order of tracks, where a few were approached more than once to shine a light on different, mutually incomparable facets of those cuts. However, when juxtaposed with prototype pieces, new numbers reveal a lot of alluring details.
Still, it’s not the outsiders’ sophistication that must impress the most here – a spectral operatic voice brought into the sinister whoosh of “Slow Motion Fade” by The Moth Poet nails the album’s intent in less than 90 seconds – but The Destroyer’s guests’ unique ability to retain the composer’s persona in various settings. Set aside the sweet schizophrenia of “The Conjuring Stops” as Andrei Rikichi, who embosses this cosmic throb with melodic strands, is simply an alter ego of the musician hidden behind the Eamon moniker, yet take, for instance, “Silver Shadow” where Yponeko replaces his strum ‘n’ shimmer with washes of musique concrète and Ryota Mikami shrouds his vocals in psychedelic swirl, while Société Cantine locates chamber grandeur in “Tomahawk Den” to expand the piece’s electric adventure. And while Stricknice searches the story of “Humanity Is Coming” to find the number’s groove, John 3:16 discovers spacey drama in there – all unlike the probes into “My Drive” performed by three sound-scientists which see House Of Tapes add haze and heavy riffs to acid folk, Michael Valentine West pour dynamic ambience into the raw pastorale, and Hanali unleash a tribal rhythm.
More so, the soft, if effervescent, reframing of the fabulous “Nothing Like Anything” by Like This Parade caresses the listener’s ears, its pseudo-orchestral treatment by Senji Niban will stress how impeccably the coherence of “A Small Blue Car” is preserved here. Here’s a vehicle that’s able to run in every make, in every guise and with every trim: an all-terrain type of transport to carry passengers beyond the pale.
Dmitry M. Epstein
DMME.NET
dmme.net/eamon-the-destroyer-a-small-blue-car-re-made-re-modelled/
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Eamon The Destroyer – “A Small Blue Car – Re-made/Re-modelled” (BS057)
To recap on a long and often retold tale of mine: I love weird shit, but I’m not quite so mad keen on remixes – unless they’re inventive and interesting. So what to make of a remix album of Eamon the Destroyer’s A Small Blue Car?
When I reviewed the album on its release back in November of last year – which barely feels like three months ago, let Alone the best part of a year – I was perhaps ambiguous in my appreciation, describing it as ‘downbeat’, gloomy’, and ‘soporific’. It is very much all of these things, but these are reasons to appreciate this understated collection of songs, with their lo-fi bedroom production style being integral to the Eamon the Destroyer listening experience as he rasps away darkly to a droning backdrop in a crackle of distortion
One frequent niggle with remix sets is the repetition, but here, only a handful of tracks appear twice, with three interpretations of ‘My Drive’, which is fair enough having been the lead single, and dispersed among sixteen tracks in total, it doesn’t feel like overkill.
The reimaginations of the original songs certainly capture their spirit and essence, from the stop/start glitchy gloopiness of the wandering Like this Parade remix of ‘Nothing Like Anything’ to the longer, more abstract reworkings, like the six-and-a-half-minute festival or reverb and cavernous slow-mo, downturned echo that is Société Cantine remix of ‘Tomahjawk Den’ that’s as experimental as you like and quite disturbing in places, to Michael Valentine West’s seven minute spin on ‘My Drive’, A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled is the definition of eclecticism. There’s low-level pulsating electronica and swerves into electronic chamber pop, against ambient electro and scraping industrial noise.
Yponeko brings swirling synths and grating distortion together in a drowning space-rock drift, while MVW deconstructs ‘My Drive’ to a junkyard of spare parts that’s somehow elegant and delicate as well as a wheezing, droning hum that wheezes and groans.
There are no obvious rehashings here, no lazy no-effort remixes that do the usual thing of whacking a booming beat behind the original. In fact, there are absolutely no stonking beats, techno or disco remixes here: these are all most sensitive to the original intent. Sometimes there are beats – as on the thrumming Ememe remix of ‘Avalanche’, but it’s a stuttering wall of drilling noise, ploughing into a mess of glitching loops, a mangled cut-up collage of sound – and often there are not: The Moth Poet’s take on ‘Slow Motion Fade’ is nightmarishly dark, a whirling churn of sound, which drifts into sepulchral opera at the end
Across the course of the album, there’s a lot of cut-and-paste splicing galore, resulting in an ever-shifting sonic collage, and John 3:16 brings gloomy, stark industrial to ‘Humanity id Coming’. House of Tapes turn ‘My Drive’ into a throbbing grunge beast, with additional helium. It’s hard to imagine anything further removed from the original, and that includes Hanali’s twisted tribal techno take on the same song.
Alongside one another, it should all amount to a horrible mess, but is, in fact, an absolute triumph, because this is exactly how it should be: Eamon the Destroyer’s original work was a kaleidoscope of darkly disorientating oddity, and this revisitation is more of the same, only different. It’s unlikely to land any spins in nightclubs across the land, and even less likely to find any of the tracks landing Radio 1 playlisting, and it’s even unlikely to win many new fans – but then again, Eamon’s acquired some admirably influential fans, and moreover, that’s not really the ambition for any artist releasing work through Bearsuit. And it’s so refreshing when so much emphasis is placed on not just sakes, but airplay, streams on Spotify, and likes and followers on various platforms, that there are still those who value artistic freedom and exploration above all else.
A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled is a source of pleasure, not only because it’s genuinely interesting, but simply because it exists
Christopher Nosnibor
[Aural Aggravation - 17.10.22]
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Eamon The Destroyer – “A Small Blue Car – Re-made/Re-modelled” (BS057)
Bearsuit is a close-knit community of musicologists and risk-takers who love to push the envelope beyond traditional musical forms – in other words, they love to take the piss.
And like 4AD’s collaborative in-house project This Mortal Coil, Bearsuit artists often contribute to each other’s releases with several artists issuing albums under various pseudonyms. Their latest release features 16 artists (some in the Bearsuit stable, others friends and friends of friends in bands the label admires) reinterpreting Eamon The Destroyer’s 2021 release, ‘A Small Blue Car.’ Some artists were so impressed with the original that they insisted on remaking tracks that other friends and fans already tackled, so we got several versions of the same song. It makes for a very interesting and, as always with Bearsuit, an occasional challenging listen.
The trip begins with Japan’s Like This Parade applying their glitchy hiccups to ‘Nothing Like Anything,’ which Senji Niban revisits in a more expansive, dreamy take via his preferred Renoise workstation, both retaining the narrative structure of the story/song. Eamon’s harmonium-driven ‘Tomahawk Den’ is given an eerie overhaul courtesy France’s Société Cantine (Cy Bianne) resulting in robotic conversations between Cy and Eamon with numerous effects tossed in to make it seem like we’re listening to half a dozen different songs at once, which is obviously M. Bianne’s intent! Bearsuit’s own electronic experimentalist Andrei Rikichi adds a rough sheen to ‘The Conjuring Stops,’ originally a soothing, throbbing electronic loop. Playing both simultaneously for maximum headswirling effect!
‘Ulederu’ originally came across like some alien transmissions from the Poltergeist telly and New Jersey’s own certifiable wingnuts Schizo Fun Addict do it justice with their own haunting gargles and glistening guitarscapes, while Bearsuit’s own Harold Nono expands ‘The Tide To steal Away’ original 73 seconds to nearly five minutes, completely reinventing its pondering ambience into a nail-biting journey through outer space: dark, foreboding, and ominously anticipatory. What lies ahead behind that next star or shimmering galaxy?
House Of Tapes (Yuuya Kuno) wreaks havoc across his laptop and Midi to imbue ‘My Drive’ with a Sabbathian, heavy metal stomp which may be too unsettling for some to bear; two other “re-models” are on offer, including Hanali’s “Gorge” music take, which combines eerie spoken-word with tribal drumming and flickering electronics and my personal favourite, Michael Valentine West’s Eno-esque ambient dreamscape. More hauntological soundscapes are delivered via The Moth Poets’ horror film soundtracking of ‘Slow Motion Fade’. The project previously collaborated with Senji Niban on an earlier Bearsuit release (‘Live At The River Lounge’) and their soothing-yet evocative remakes are among my favourites here, alongside John 3:16 (Phillipe Gerber)’s ambient drones and Stricknice’s melodic glitch cut-ups that permeate ‘Humanity Is Coming.’
There is much to digest here and while not everything may be your personal cuppa, it gives you an excellent cross section of the state of today’s electronic and experimental music scene.
Jeff Penczak
[It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine – 10.11.22]
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Many thanks to all the artists involved in this project:
Misawa Masanori, Cyril Bianne, Nicolas Slimany, Michael Valentine West, Hiroshi Nomura, Philippe Gerber, The Moth Poet, Jet Wintzer (Schizo Fun Addict), Koichiro Shigeno Ryota Mikami, Harold Nono, Yuuya Kuno, Jason Strickland, Toki Takumi, Andrei Rikichi & Ivor Perry
Copyright © 2022 Bearsuit Records, ℗ 2022 Bearsuit Records
released October 21, 2022
