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Reformed Faction, "The World Awake!/11 Stueck"
This year seems like a wildly and uncharacteristically prolific one for Mark Spybey and Robin Storey, as they have already released this double-album, a soundtrack, and now have yet another double-album coming out next month.  That avalanche of new material is a bit deceptive though, as these recordings are actually taken from two days of improvisations back in 2009.  The duo were certainly inspired on those particular days, but many of these pieces too easily betray their made-up-on-the-spot origin.  As a result, this massive album simultaneously recalls both the best and the worst aspects of Zoviet France's legacy.
Aside from both originating around the same time, the two halves of this album seem to have little in common.  The World Awake!, which borrows its title from a passage in Henry Miller's "With Edgar Varese in the Gobi Desert," mostly captures the duo engaging in some prime Zoviet France-style haunted, faux-tribal ambiance.  In fact, the album starts off brilliantly, as something that sounds like creepy, distressed backwards tape loops segues into inhuman howls, trance-inducing Eastern percussion, and buzzing, eerily processed wind instruments.  Unfortunately, the catch is that by the time I checked to see which song I was hearing, I was already midway through the album's third piece.  That is the curse of The World Awake!: some of Spybey and Storey's best ideas are dispensed with in a minute or two without any evolution, while less distinctive and compelling pieces are allowed to unfold for much longer than necessary (like the 15-minute dark ambient foray "The First Word").  There are certainly some great ideas here though–I just wish more of them had been allowed to expand into great songs.
For the 11 Stueck half, the core duo are joined by a handful of guest musicians.  Stylistically, these identically named pieces are all over the map: harsh, evil-sounding drone; Godspeed-esque cinematic narratives; deranged synth blow-outs; bizarre off-beat post-rock; and weird avant-garde spoken word are all represented at least once.  The sole recurring theme seems to be that they are a lot more dense and loose-sounding than anything on the first half: these pieces definitely sound like a group of musicians jamming in a room together (albeit a rather outré group, of course).  To a certain degree, 11 Stueck suffers from the same "either prematurely abandoned or not edited aggressively enough" issues of the first half, but the success rate is a bit higher and the pieces tend to have a lot more individual character.  I especially liked the sixth "Stueck," which would have fit nicely onto 2009's massive and more "rock" I Am The Source of Light, I Am Not A Mirror, but there are quite a few other striking moments to be found elsewhere.
On one hand, I am a bit baffled as to why Reformed Faction does not seem to elicit even a fraction of the reverence and enthusiasm that Zoviet France once did, as Mark and Robin frequently equal or better their previous band's offerings.  I understand that the times are different and that a lot of ZF's appeal lay in their mystery and perverse packaging, but Spybey and Storey's recent work is as unique and adventurous as ever.  On the other hand though, Reformed Faction definitely have some self-sabotaging tendencies-for example, it is very hard to find one self-contained piece on this entire album to hold up as an example of why this band matters.  As a whole, The World Awake!/11 Stueck is still a satisfyingly unsettling and hallucinatory ride that achieves something of a flow in its own weird, uneven way, but it loses a lot of its power when broken down into its individual parts.
(amusing sidenote: this album unintentionally boasts its own perverse packaging, as the Soleilmoon website now warns that the perfumed insert can cause allergic reactions.  I seem to have escaped unscathed though...for now.).
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