The Mandelbrot Set at High Point Low Life: All Our Actions are Constantly Repeated

The Mandelbrot Set is one of the new young Postrock-bands (1) hailing from the UK these days, Post-Mogwai, if you dare. Their music is extremely dense and loud, very melodic and they draw a lot of inspiration from the 90’s shoegazing acts, namely My Bloody Valentine and Ride. Yndi Halda is the second band you should be familiar with, though I think The Mandelbrot Set is the more exiting, the more experimental outlet.
The band consists of Keung at guitar and delay, Simon behind the battery and Melisa at bass, guitar and 100 other instruments. “All Our Actions are Constantly Repeated” is their debut at the London High Point Low Life-label. HPLL are a CD and CDr-label but they just decided to deposit their whole back catalogue for free download at Last.fm (@128kbit), so you will be able to try the music and purchase the (very beautiful) CD at a low price later on. London calling!

The album starts with “And the Rockets Red Glare/ Bombs Bust in Air“. Dry tribal drums and a tight Postpunk-bass line build the song’s dense backbone. Keung and Melisa come in with Albini-style guitars before the song breaks down after two minutes. Delayed guitars introduce the second part, rather calm, before the band return in amplified bliss, packed with distortion and volume. The production of the whole album is very well done so the loud passages do not drown in overload. You can carefully follow the textures that form beyond the wall of sound, at least most of the time.
After a short track with echoed and bowed guitar, 13-minutes monster “Constellation of Rings” is my favourite tune. The bass-guitar starts with a simple melody, to clean guitars join-in and decorate the motive. Drums approach with cymbal hiss and take on a relaxed groove. Melisa can be heard on cello, giving this part a very intimate feel. After three meters, she surprises with a stunning banjo-melody. She doesn’t play something totally intriguing, but in concert with the rest of the band, groove and melody work perfectly hand in hand. After six minutes downswing, the guitars absorb the banjo-melody, gently enhancing volume and density. These are the parts you wish to see The Mandelbrot Set live. I love these moments when the whole band melts to a single sound amalgam, when dynamic elements are fused to textures, and new elements form psycho-acoustical beneath the music that is played. Here, shoegazing Postrock continues a Minimal Music-tradition listeners should know about when judging this kind of music.

The tune afterwards is the most experimental composition on the album, resuming to the high energy Ambient-passages of “Constellation of Rings”. While all of the others tracks got definitive melodies, “Seismic Waves Travelling Through” is made of tonal guitar-textures, swaying cello and Free Jazz-drums. All instruments and effect-tracks rise and fall like a breast goes up and down while breathing, or, referring to the title, like the earth shaking in waves during an earthquake. Haunting. “Benoit B. Mandelbrot” comes with dominant drums and reverberation guitars in the back. The track brings back some of the aggression introduced in the first song. The guitars swell in heavy distortion, bass-guitar with simple, stoic chords, drums domineering. With an intimate and sparse middle part, The Mandelbrot Set prove that Slint and Shellac have to be quoted as an influence, too. The claustrophobic ending is awesome.

I guess it’s quite typical for a band like The Mandelbrot Set to choose an abstract, scientific concept (2) to describe their music. It suits the band very well, still it might be a bit obvious. The great cover artwork for “All Our Actions are Constantly Repeated” is a more inspired example for the band’s idea of art. It shows the world oil consumption and production in coloured squares. With the CD, you get a transparent card to quantize the consumption on five, 100 and 1000 million barrels per year. Politics, science and graphic design in perfect union.

Get the record here: All Our Actions are Constantly Repeated
Direct download: no ZIP-file provided…

Appendix

(1) Sometimes I wonder what makes most musicians react allergic if listeners try to categorize their music. Okay, nobody likes to be reduced to a handful of influences or genres. Still, naming the different sources an artists derives inspiration from doesn’t mean the outcome is less creative, exiting or new (for sure- when was the last time you’ve been listening to music you totally wasn’t able to name the cultural background?) In particular, the term “Postrock” is under heavy artillery. I think this genre classification is rather on point: Rock music that neglects the overcome (post = afterwards) rules of Pop-dramaturgy (short and easy structured songs, common tonality, focus on the vocalist) and Rock n’ Roll-clichés (dominant heterosexual behaviour, dull demonstration of strength, extrovertism). Nothing that hasn’t been lead ad absurdum by Punk, Postpunk (!) and Indierock before, nevertheless Postrock may be the most extreme variety concerning the commercial relevant Subgenres of Rock music. No vocals, no choruses, long-term tracks that may be closer to Brian Eno than The Beatles. Taking all these points in account one can say The Mandelbrot Set are a classical Postrock-band. Does this have to mean that their record is boring? No!

(2) Benoît Mandelbrot (*1924) is a French-American mathematician who was the first to describe the Mandelbrot-effect on a graphical level. The effect deals with self-similarity in fractal geometry and plays a key role in Chaos theory, the so-called Mandelbrot Set is known to the public for his highly aesthetical visualizations.