Italian noisemakers Aquarian (of no known relation to the alternative weekly newspaper based in New Jersey) left off the back end of the quote with the title of their album Art is the Flower, Life is the Green Leaf. Architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh said in 1902, ?Art is the flower, Life is the green leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing.? Be that as it may, the album shimmers nonetheless with its own lifelike qualities, if modern and alienated ones. Art is the Flower, Life is the Green Leaf paints a sonic spectrum of drone and purported minimalism, injecting noise into its open spaces to give a feeling of fullness.

A duo comprised of Esse and The Pop Anarchist, who handle between them guitars, bass, drones and sundry other noisemakers, Aquarian are at once ritualistic (?Bright Glass on a Chain Being Wound Around Us?), organic (?Some People Feed on Other People?) and inhuman (?Clear Dry Space?). The music is mostly drone and electronics-based, but there is liberal use of feedback throughout, and the 26-plus minute ?Iris, Tulip and Columbine? is about as close as Aquarian gets to actual heavy riffing. With sounds both dense and cohesive, the band is able to fuse various styles and moods to create a sound unique among its noisy peers.

Seeing as it was released on Dufresne Attack in 2006, if Art is the Flower, Life is the Green Leaf was going to change the way people experienced noise or drone, it probably would have done so by now. Nonetheless, as a curio for followers of the droning avant garde, the album delivers ambience across a range of emotional evocations, wistful in one place and seething in the next, while remaining relatively inactive throughout. That is, no jumping around. Closer ?Combining? would seem to bring all these moods, styles and executions together, but it doesn?t really. More than anything else, it just ends the album in a subdued, contemplative position. Appropriate.

SunnO))) have become a catch-all band for comparison to acts who, like Aquarian, require an open mind for a satisfying listen, but sonically the two have little in common. Perhaps with the drone of ?Iris, Tulip and Columbine,? a line could be drawn one to the next, but even this connection is tenuous at best and could be made to any number of other acts. Aquarian are perhaps even farther out. Art is the Flower, Life is the Green Leaf isn?t quite psychedelic, but listening certainly does have transformative aspects. Anyone sick of being stuck in a genre — any genre — might find reprieve in Aquarian?s individualism. A warning though: only 50 physical copies of the album were made. Obscurity ahoy!

Dufresne Attack

Tags: Aquarian, Dufresne Attack, Italy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.