Magik Markers - A Penegyric to Things I Do Not Understand (Gulcher records)

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Magik Markers’ performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year changed my life, or at the very least has been directly responsible for a lot of the best things that have happened to me over the past nine months.

It’s hard to convey in words the actually mechanics of a Magik Markers performance without it sounding fairly stoopid – I think a visual record of the spectacle works a lot better, so here's a link to some photos that'll give you the general idea. In addition, here's one cool photo I found on the ATP site;



Raaurgh!

At a certain point at ATP - possibly as Eliza Ambrogio stood on the edge of the stage spitting incomprehensible insults into the faces of the crowd and projecting her guitar in front of her like a phallic wand, punching the strings with her fist, and as Leah Quimby slowly thumped the neck of her bass against the floor and Pete Nolan finally gave up any attempt at a rhythm and collapsed through the front of his kit – a bolt of lightning hit me in the forehead, cleared my mind and helped me realise again what I learned long ago from the Ramones, but that somehow got lost in transit at some point during the expansion of my record collection: that musical proficiency and comprehensibility are totally irrelevant, that anyone with self-belief and the right attitude can get on stage and just SHRED, and maybe they’ll be the best band in the world, and maybe they’ll be the worst band in the world, but what they won’t be is BORING, and that’s what counts – kicking shit up, making an impression.

So keeping this revelation in mind, a few days after the festival I scrawled out some flyers saying I wanted to start a crazy open-ended type band, ability not an issue. I left a few of them around. To my great surprise, this actually generated some responses and has introduced me to a few extremely good friends whom I’d never otherwise have met and, although I haven’t actually got anything mega-cool nailed down yet, it’s encouraged me to really throw my efforts into making some music, with both new allies and old.

Ironically, nothing I’ve had a go at thus far has been anywhere near the confrontational chaos of the ‘Markers, and actually I’ve ended up mostly riding a pretty conventional train, learning to play the guitar a lot better, pulling some threads of song-writing together, taking tentative steps toward singing and recording.

So I guess I owe the Magik Markers and the spirit they breathed into me big-time, but until this weekend I’d never actually heard any of their appropriately weird and scattered recorded output.

So anyway, yeah, this new Magik Markers CD I bought off Volcanic Tongue. It’s GREAT! It really does manage to a certain degree to capture the exhilarating freedom/destruction dynamic of their live performances. It’s divided into two 20 minute tracks, each accompanied by a scribbled list of arbitrary and probably fake song titles such as “Jung Knew Enough to Shut Up”, “The Ghost Combs Round at Midnight” and, my personal favourite, “One More Time Against the Wall”. The drummer is flamin’ throughout, laying down a few almost death metal licks amid the inevitable free-form antics, and I could swear the girls are actually, like, playing their guitars at some points, and it sounds like one of the blighters has a wah-wah pedal too. There are also bits of near silence, whistling, DIY percussion, broken strings etc that sound like some kinda pre-school Moondog and prove that whatever these crazy kids turn their hands (and mouths and feet and knuckles and foreheads) to, there’s some kinda unique spirit going on that renders it totally compelling where certain others in the avant-free-whatever type underground just come across as time-wasters. There’s a section of early Sonic Youth string-scrapin’ vengeance about 7 minutes into track 2 that just plain rocks so much it’s positively Zeppelin, man!

The hints at formalism starting to creep through the ‘Markers attack on this CD make for a record that’s actually lots of fun to listen to, without losing sight of any of the inspiring, atavistic craziness that makes Magik Markers akin to opening up a barrel of “WHAT THE FUCK?” and jumping right in. I don’t think Elisa shouts or howls or swears enough, but aside from that this is tops.