The Shenzhen bookstore, record label and live venue Old Heaven Books releases a couple of solo recordings by Mamer, who performed on consecutive nights in the middle of June for the fifth and sixth installments of his ‘Imitator’ series.
Wildly different though both feature Mamer on the electric guitar, the first night is packed to the brim with fraying distortions and staticky repetitions over strapping backbeats. When droning and chant-like vocals make their presence felt on the second track from Underground Factory, the result is like Super æ crossed with Metal Machine Music, and as the live album embraces more of the trappings of industrial noise in its second half, the sometimes piercing feedback gives way to angular post-punk melodies and some of the funkier electronic ripples which were already latent in Kraftwerk before they were picked up by the Detroit techno pioneers, with the first part of the sixth and final track on Underground Factory redolent of the shimmying Trans-Europe Express standout ‘Showroom Dummies’.
The following night Mamer forewent the drum machines, the blips and beeps and more salacious shards of his most scabrous shredding, turning instead to a set of traditional Kazakh and Tatar folk tunes plus a few original compositions. The title for the performance is Imitate Sky but the record depicts a rapt gaze bounded by the noise of a crackling fire, or maybe just the last few smouldering embers. Slow and spellbinding and occasionally redolent of Americana or primitivism, the record blazes to life at the halfway point, at the tail-end of the track ‘蔓草 Trailing Plant / Xermawek’, but far from a cauldron of sound the second side of the album is even more spectral with a few heaters like on the stormy ‘黑云雀 Dark Sparrow / Kara Torgay’ before a searing denouement.
