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Strings of Consciousness
Our Moon is Full

Central Control International

Posted: Tuesday, August 21, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

An eclectic collaboration of electronic composers and acoustic musicians, Strings of Consciousness blend jazz, classical, and art-rock sensibilities with a fuzzy undercurrent of down-tempo electronics. Throw in a crew of guest vocalists that range from industrial legend J.G. Thirlwell to Parisian spoken word artist Black Sifichi, and you've got a recipe for the year's most pretentious album. Get over it; you're allowed to be a little pretentious when you've got brains and talent. From the very beginning, Our Moon is Full sets the bar high, if for nothing else than unpredictability. You get J.G. Thirlwell doing guest vocals, you think you know what you’re going to get, but his jazzy falsetto on "Asphodel" is the polar opposite of the gravelly drawl you've come to expect from the Foetus mastermind. Just when you think you're ready for an album of experimental lounge music though, things turn 180 degrees and you get "Crystallize It," a stony, sludgy rock piece centered around the disaffected vocals of Girls Against Boys' Scott McCloud. Things keep going from there, ranging from mellow jazz poetry on "Cleanliness is Next to Godliness" to languid art-rock on "In Between." The lovely if brief "Defrost_Oven," all twinkling strings and wordless female vocals, provides a nice respite from the extended beatnik explorations around the middle of the disc. It's DJ and poet Black Sifichi, a comparatively obscure artist in North America, who provides some of the album's most stirring moments; "When the Sun Burns Out Another Sun" is musically understated, offering little more than some softly played guitars, but Sifichi's stream of consciousness monologue makes up for its lack of narrative with disjointed and stunning imagery. Sifichi also closes things out on "Midnight Moonbeams," a piano-laced trip-hop comedown that hints of disjointed wisdom emerging from an addled mind. Strings of Consciousness members have previously worked in such critically acclaimed but inaccessible outfits as Pere Ubu, Soft Machine, and The Sea and Cake, so you already know you're not going to be able to dance to this or do much singing along, but if you happen to work at a hipster-infested coffee house, you probably owe it to your clientele to put this one on the restaurant sound system.