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Tarantula AD
(We featured this artist last year. The following is a semi-reprint, with sections updated.)
A punk rock drummer walking down St. Mark's Place. Fugitives sitting in an anonymous, smokey coffee house, skulking in the corner. A wild cellist, case in tow, rushing madly about the streets of some European town -- Berlin, perhaps, or maybe Budapest. A pair of lovers, dressed in their best tango-ing outfits, having a quarrel on the streets of Paris. The sneering gypsy with his violin in one hand and the other on the knife hanging from his belt; he surveys the room quietly, with a glimmer of mischief in his eye. This is history, this is drama, this is merely your imagination, this is circumstance, and this is a band named Tarantula AD (formerly known as just "Tarantula"). They've been described as "prog-chamber" or "classical punk" but I prefer to call it music for the novel that's still being written in your head. One of my favorite quotations is from Tokion Magazine: "a sound so dramatic it’ll draw pictures inside your shuttered eyelids." Because Tarantula AD is best taken with your eyes shut, daydreaming of abstract colors and slow motion picture scenes.
Drawing from such disparate sources of inspiration as free jazz, nuevo tango, and classical string quartets, the daring and freewheeling will take you musky libraries and dirty street corners. Tarantula AD is about the melding of minds and the beautifully unexpected, where one half of the band looks like they'd be playing your grandmother's tea party and the other half of the band looks perfectly at home at your neigborhood dive bar.
Songs on Book of Sand integrate the most bone-chilling, grinding heavy metal riffs with soothing chamber music landscapes. They take the soft-loud-soft dynamic of The Pixies and Nirvana stretch it into new directions: It's Tin Hat Trio meets the Tosca Tango Orchestra meets Bill Frisell meets The Dirty Three meets that shitty punk rock band that's always practicing in the garage, all synthesizing into a single, mesmerizing entity that explores everything from an all-out, powerful wall of sound to the quietest, most intense moment between a single violin or a glockenspiel. Live, the band successfully gives every performance their all, 110%, creating a great wave of sound that pounds the shore and recedes, over and over again; appropiate as their album was recorded in a wooden lodge on the banks of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere off the coast of Washington State.
Tarantula AD - Embedded In Ice
Tarantula AD - Opening Theme
Tarantula AD - Who Took Berlin (Part I)
Tarantula AD - Sealake
Official Tarantula site. Buy their full-length, Book of Sand, from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. Buy their self-titled EP from Insound.
Posted by Queen of the Front Row at 02.06.06 at 12:11 PM
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