Balkans release first of monthly mixtape series
To the Moon or Bust! is an intriguing document of the kind of whirlwind energy the Balkans wield, but it’s not for the faint of heart...
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The Balkans have unveiled the first of a new monthly mixtape series that’s available for download from TheBalkans-blog.blogspot.com.
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The first mixtape, To the Moon or Bust!, features 15 tracks of lo-fi sketches of new songs, live recordings, strange rhythmic interludes and jumps between song fragments. It’s like an audio journal that carries on the traditions of the Sebadoh/Sentridoh home recording era of the early ’90s, presenting earnest experiments and general dicking around with a 4-Track as art.
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This kind of thing gives an awful lot of insight into how the group operates by showing the internal apparatuses as they’re working out songs.
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Sometimes watching the process as it unfolds can be just as important as grasping the final product, and there’s an awful lot of material to wade through here. Fidelity rises and falls in a pastiche of varying degrees of sound quality, i.e., there is nothing polished about this project. Some of the live material (“VG 529” and “EV 529”) will be familiar if you’ve seen them play anytime over the last year.
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“Eating Dinner in the Dining Room” is a noisy round of drumming, droning and wailing that recalls Animal Collective pre-Danse Manatee. Other numbers like “Sarasota,” “Mob-Life Instrumental” and the excessively blown-out “Lady Killer” are intriguing first drafts of things to come, presented in all of their raw and unrefined glory.
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... And how about that cover shot? Did Frankie’s parents ever check his scalp for a 666 birthmark?
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To the Moon or Bust! is an awesome document of the kind of whirlwind energy these guys bring to the stage, in its developing stages. But if you’re uptight about things like fidelity and cohesion, this probably isn’t for you.