F I S H B O W L / T E R R E S T R I A L – Alienbaby Collective (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Titles can tell you a lot about music. Not so much what that music might sound like but it does suggest something about the way the artist behind it thinks. Anyone who capitalises their title and introduces unnecessary spacing, writes track names in lowercasewithnospacing, removes vowels from a ttl or uses one title to reference another, should immediately be flagged up as worth a closer look. After all if they are being this creative with the mere titles, what are they going to be doing with the songs themselves? There is only one way to find out….

Alienbaby Collective is the nome de plume of Liu Mottes who was previously found as guitarist in both Blue Crime and New YX and who also currently plays with SOON, Slow Worries and OBOL LE. As a teaser for this debut release, Degenerate Moon acted as a gentle warning of the seriously strange, and indeed strangely serious, art attacks that were to follow but it perhaps didn’t quite ready the listener for just how unique, odd and beguiling a record (or double ep if you prefer) would follow.

There are tracks which are more riff and song structured such as Plant. Girl.  and there are songs which seem happy to explore distorted noise such as t e r r e s t r i a l, seemingly inspired by a mix of pulsing ancient primal sounds and a car production line having a nervous breakdown. There are short half-songs, snippets of sound such as cosmicdance and the longer, more exploratory and fluid musical meanderings of  T I T L E.

Lyrics are irrelevant, though there are some beguiling whispers and vocal sounds found here and there but they are never more than sly vocal winks in the listeners direction. Songs don’t go where you expect them too, end when you were just starting to get to grips with them and are so wonderfully genre-hopping, or more properly genre-avoiding, that they make you wonder why we put up with all that tribalistic demarcation that music was subjected to for so long.

F I S H B O W L / T E R R E S T R I A L is different. So different. In all respects. Not in the way that almost every other artists declares to be breaking new ground, but in the way that it breaks new musical ground that you probably couldn’t have found on any conventional map in the first place.