Mavourneen - Bliss
MAVOURNEEN UNLEASH ‘BLISS’
Tapetown Studio and Drowned in Sound sponsored a special event at the 2019 Spot Festival. Three bands performed live at Tapetown’s studio. The performances were recorded for later release. Just over a week ago, the Tapetown Sessions video of Denmark’s noise outfit Mavourneen was released.
Mavourneen
Located in Aarhus, Denmark, and referred to as “the sound of Aarhus” by Drowned in Sound, Tapetown Studio is operated by Danish producer Rasmus Bredvig.
Mavourneen is a duo, guitar and drums. Their sound balances a merger of shoegaze and noise rock into a deliciously muscular banshee wail of incredible elegance and sophistication. They just finished laying down tracks for their debut album at Sonic Youth’s studio, Echo Canyon West, in New York, under the guidance of Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley.
The band’s name – Mavourneen – comes from the Irish Gaelic mo mhuirnin, and is translated as “my beloved” or “my darling.” Other than the above information, nothing further is known about the band. Not even the names of the two guys who make up the band, except this: according to Simon Lund Pedersen of Passive Aggressive, the guitarist/vocalist is Hans Gustav Bjørklund Moulvad, and “Mavourneen” refers to the “sound of the gnawing winter depressions, where weather and lack of light give us a feeling of waste of time.”
This is a voice grimacing with desperation, subtly tightening from within and exploding with raw guttural force on the outside.
“Bliss” opens on searing avant-garde washes of intoxicating and heavily distorted sound from the guitar, as if being launched through a worm hole into the Empyrean. As the warped tones take shape, the drums kick in with raw grubby weight. Amazingly, the tune acquires a blistering fulminating melody. Even though the melody remains submerged in a visceral, impassable wall of noise, it’s there and recognizable. What’s more it’s infectiously superb.
The drummer displays marvelous talent, relaxed, powerful, rumbling, on the verge of anarchy, but never tipping over the line into rhythmic bedlam.
The lead singer’s vocals exude unbridled reckless dynamism rife with grating, smudged timbres and wailing howls akin to spectral vocalizations from the denizens of Dante’s Inferno. This is a voice grimacing with desperation, subtly tightening from within and exploding with raw guttural force on the outside.
Mavourneen rips it up with crazy, almost irresponsible ferocity akin to riding the sonic pressure wave of an atomic hurricane. This band is locked in tight.
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