Run, you handsome lovely ones
Carlo Mombelli cannot be outlined as what he creates, but rather what he knows. Whether he’s spending a lazy Sunday contrasting a meal into an opportunity to chime tricks and sounds with the crockery on the table, or powering Thursday evenings with experimental collateral at what was once a familiar territory for all: The Zoo Lake Bowls Club, or airing his latest collaborations at Jazz festivals and intimate bars, his likelihood to creation is in the music he sees, the chords his memories echo and the confluence of the always new, the never forgotten.
In ‘The Bells of Gitschenen’ I am swallowed up incongruent noises steered inwards by the popping percussion and an embedded variety of intense maneuvers steaming in their fragility. Sneering from my lip, letting it sit between my nose, the edge is shuffling, causing friction in its mighty emptiness.
“As I press my spine into the ground, I see the earth behind me. As I press my spine into the ground, I see eternity in front of me. This night is dark. But I suppose only in the darkest night do the heavens shine the brightest. I look, and I can see the distant star as I press my fragile spine into the ground.” – voiced by Brenda Sisane.
The sobering keys of Kyle Shepherd’s piano leaves things untangled and vulnerable, by way of inflammatory editing grinding the flecks of yesterday’s tears and tomorrow’s heart beats. The composition is wry of planet earth, of unplanned landfills, oil clogs in the animals that have now come to fear the ocean, and the soil, dry and begging for rainfall. The vertebrae is tingling, from reminders of Tumi Mogorosi’s percussive spitting shortened gravity to Mombelli’s sympathetic bass lines, the tone cannot help but imprint the weeping it instills in its audible sensory assurity. ‘I press my spine to the ground’ is an ode to all that is around us, frothing its motion, staggering a lifetime of stories.
Mbuso Khoza lends her phonetics to ‘Maya’s Meshes’, rising above the equilibrium of Shepherd’s double twitch, to a visual enigma of height, then a slight erratic subverb. It continues with swollen vocals, and subdues their endings with an elevated consciousness.
‘Bass Spirits’ is confluent and non prescribed, romanticising climax in the verse of bass brevity. The chords feel like a feline’s paws prodding on the grimaced textures beneath it. Sticking to their signature experimental verbosity, Mombelli, Mogorosi and Shepherd contribute to a known awakening, as the tempo shifts form and livens up from a damp flooded fixture to an intrepid collusion of the very now.
‘Picasso’s Dove’ is etched in a considerate amount of passion between the piano and the vocal fluidity. This stretch of land is growing in trepidous anticipation of a forever today, where every instinctual part of its momentum resonates with each segment, each limb and some forgotten sorrows and a wistful end.
Superpowers, super twins, 3000 years of needs. We watch the lonely poets sing and fall into the pits. We heard the horrid torrid pain, we saw a nasty toothless thing. It roared, it sneered. It bit its tongue. A careless sliver, a tiny shiver. Run, you handsome lonely ones.
