Warning, These will go quick!!!!
The excellent World Of Echo, reissue the second release of skeletal DIY London-based three piece Mosquitoes as a dubplate-style 10".
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Clive Phillips, Dominic Goodman, Peter Blundell are Mosquitoes, a somewhat inscrutable London-based outfit in operation for something close to seven years now, and have released music across a host of celebrated and broad-minded underground labels. Give or take the occasional interview in the less-straight parts of the music press, this is as much formal biography as their music has thus far allowed, for there's something essentially unknowable at the centre of what makes Mosquitoes what they are. So murky is their early history in fact, the first two self-released Mosquitoes records seemed to disappear from sight before really becoming visible. As more records have emerged, those first communications accumulate new meanings, acting as vital documents in tracking the evolution of a band who stand at the vanguard of contemporary British music.
Mosquitoes plug into a long lineage of DIY savant iconoclasts, those outliers who would deny orthodoxy in order to excavate new languages and ideas - The Dead C, This Heat, the anti-formalism of No Wave, David Toop's General Strike. As such, Mosquitoes rely on a musical pluralism in order to take it apart - you must know how something is made before you reassemble it anew. Labelling this an EP may possibly underplay the breadth and ambition of what's on show. Later records would arguably be more cohesive, but what stands as particularly startling with this early work is their fearless and all-encompassing dive into the avant garde. Consider the anti-rockism of the scorched earth 90s re-imagined through a distinctly avant filter of free jazz and dub aesthetics. And it's the latter which perhaps shapes Mosquitoes most, dub the perfect vehicle for the articulation of such wilful anti-formalism. Make no mistake, this is music that's unafraid to be tough, to demand something of the listener and to not ask permission. And to bear witness to a rejection of formalism so aggressively pursued is to be reconciled.
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Released: March 5th, World of Echo
WOE002 | 10" | ltd to 300
Tracklisting:
A1. Diodic
A2. Fullscan
A3. Eraserom
B1. Hexadex
B2. Strobeluck
Broken, atonal guitar scree, ultra-minimal half-jazz percussion and nervous bass probing with songs reduced to a few desolate lines.
“Supposing I live to be one hundred, I like to think that on my deathbed in 2081, if someone were to hand me a 7″ single and say, “hey, check this out, it’s limited to 100, self-released and is kinda no-wavey” I’d still light up like a child catching a Mickey Mantle home run. I certainly was glad to check out this one from the UK’s Mosquitoes, a bass / drums / guitar trio that play somewhere between DNA de-tuning their instruments before practice or Sightings with the PA system and all their effects turned off. The a-side’s “Keep Breathing” has that nervous Sightings bass transmission going, that’s for sure, while the other two squabble like Menstruation Sisters. The b-side’s “Life, End Of” follows an uncomfortable jazz dance on the bass while the guitar squeaks in and out and the vocalist mutters something about something, calling to mind some sort of informal interlude produced by a Mars / US Maple collaboration. Completely inessential and wonderful record right here.” – Yellow Green Red
