* PREORDER * AL KARPENTER - Greatest Heads LP

* PREORDER * expected to arrive next week

Previous LP, The Forthcoming, also in stock.

Fourth album by the radical Basque-Berlinesque group Al Karpenter. A deconstruction of structured “rock” music, here Al Karpenter re-imagine “the band” to explore the intersection between Free music, afro-beat, the avant garde and gonzo rock. If Theodore Adorno wrote “To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is Barbaric” in 1949, Al Karpenter attempts to answer the difficult question today; what kind of music can be done in the face of a genocide? Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini & Mattin’s response to the planet’s slipping into a vortex of hate is to create a music ecstatic, a music of protest bursting with multiple musical languages and glossaries, full of overlapping histories and thrilling tensions. 

Greatest Heads posits a plurality of musics both in opposition and intertwined: Al Karpenter play rock instruments pulled apart in the studio in post-production. Distorted rhythm chunks bit-crushed and dissipated, segments of freedom oppressed by waves of sound invading from every direction. The interplay between the chief instrumentalists and renowned, storied sound artist Mattin creates something akin to ESP freedom-seekers Cro Magnon playing in Miles Davis’ early 70s groups, The Los Angeles Free Music Society tightening up into a clenched fist of plunderphonics and runaway percussion.

We Are All Karpenters opens Greatest Heads with the most straight-forward song refrain of the record accompanied by a band that soon crash into eruption, imagining Sun City Girls in full free rock mode. The modulating synth sound soon sucks the band into its wake to create a spine-chilling climax of distorted sound, made fully orgasmic with mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s attention to detail.