Mimir

Mimir is the highly adventurous, quietly experimental music of musicians Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots, ubiquitous out-music guitarist Jim O'Rourke, Christoph Heeman, textures whiz Seeman, and Andreas Martin. There are six untitled tracks here, each one completely different than its predecessor. Track one is a gorgeous miniature ambient soundscape with violins, whirring sounds of wind coming through strings, and there's a gentle wash of keyboards and lots of well-placed silence. Track two, however, is a meditation on multi-tracking guitars that are playing a country shuffle not unlike moments in Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline Rag." Motion and travel are the themes as the guitars endlessly repeat open country themes that get underscored by unidentifiable sounds and noises and are extrapolated upon by still other guitars while never losing their central riff. The side closes with a fairly insistent, though dark and airy guitar/piano duet enhanced with streams of white noise and feedback Side two is a batch of electronically manipulated tape studies, where some instruments enter the fray, but mostly it feels like spliced and manipulated tape. And since there are no credits on the thing other than the band members' names, there is nothing to do but guess. It's compelling, however, in a nightmarish sort of way. These final three tracks create a different kind of tapestry than the first side, instead of laid-back mysterious beauty, the offer a paranoid set of figures for listener's to meditate upon as they grow tenser with each passing moment. On green vinyl and limited to a run of 950 numbered copies, this is an out-music fan's fetish of choice.