Air Cushion Finish @ Arkaoda, Berlin 2019
Date: 04.06.2019 / 20:00
Location: Arkaoda in Berlin (DE)
Entry fee:
?? Euro (estimate).
Band website
Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria (Sing Sinck, Sing) // Air Cushion Finish
Doors open 20h
Start 21h
LIVE
Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria are Sing Sinck, Sing
Air Cushion Finish
Menuck, the legendary Montréal-based musician, founder of Godspeed You! Back Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion, has much-deserved cult status among fans of political punk, post-rock and avant-noise songcraft alike. Menuck celebrates 25 years of unflinching and uncompromising sonic output with Pissing Stars, wherein he launches acerbic darts, impassioned salvos and fragile flowers into gusts of noise-battered song built around pulsing maximalist electronics and drone, composed on modular synthesizer and guitar, shot through with alternately plaintive, chilling, often processed vocals. Pissing Stars is Menuck at his most vulnerable and his most adventurous – with a timely narrative framework that only he could conjure. For Sing Sinck, Sing Menuck will be joined by Kevin Doria from Growing and Total Life.
Menuck recruited Doria to help him translate his acclaimed 2018 album Pissing Stars from the studio to the stage, and the pair have been touring under the Efrim Manuel Menuck moniker for the past year (often with Doria’s latest solo project KGD opening the proceedings). They’ve also been co-writing piles of new material, diving deeper into whirling maximalist electronics, still shot through with Menuck’s incantatory singing awash in plaintive distortion and hope.
Air Cushion Finish is multi-style and real time music. It’s made from anything the players come up with at a particular moment – and naturally this music defies style definitions. The slow motion part at least is sometimes referred to as homeopathic punk…
Air Cushion Finish formed in Berlin in 2007 and comprised composer/player jayrope and natural vocal synthesizer Lippstueck, who had enjoyed playing Berlin’s underground together since the 1990s. Lippstueck prominently sings, wordless and backwards in time, while his partner jayrope tends to also appreciate any DIY, electronic, string or percussion instrument small enough to fit into a single suitcase altogether.
Changing setup and subsequently music is programmatic to them, as well as having friends as guest musicians, all resulting into an unforeseeable slow motion cacophony of whispers, bleeps, rhythms and harmonies.
There’s a notion of Dada, but you never know.
This rather poetic note about their separation from cemented structures & styles took them to places. ACF got to support a number of their own favourite artists along the line. Subsequently ACF’s 8th album FLINK – upon a friendly invitation – was recorded and mixed with Thierry Amar at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango. For the first time in a proper studio, if you will, but nonetheless with an audience present at recording time. The resulting double 12” ‘Flink’ was released on Lullabies for Insominacs in early 2017, telling of ACF’s current state of poetical accident, swaying, swinging and bouncing, boldly careful, like a transparent tattoo on your forehead.
