The bizarro brilliant brain-child of that bloke who plays guitar with Balloons - Mr. Ben Duvall - and also featuring the talents of George Maund from Indica Ritual, Ex-Easter Island Head is a totally fucking awesome example of stepping outside the fucking box, pissing all over it, filling it with dogshit, setting fire to it and then leaving the stinking thing on the front porch of Jo-Whiley’s indie boy-band twat factory.
Set up as three de-tuned guitars, all featuring a limited amount of strings, and balanced incongruously atop of three optimistic looking keyboard stands, Ben and George perform an ambient, percussive victory of grumbling, exquisite, exorcised noise accomplished with only a tense amount of extreme concentration and drum mallets hammering against strings and guitar faces.
Simplistic in it’s lack of vocals, the momentum is carried by slow build up’s of rhythm and repetition which chime discordantly like bells announcing a lost hour to a an already lost World. The whole piece is incredibly percussive of time and of hidden dimensions between time - like a momento-mori in which the skull beats against it’s own life-span.
The performance is terse and breathless, it has a delicate, tribal, dystopia to it - at their first gig supporting The Portico Orchestra in The Kazimier, there was an intensity which no-one dared breathe against. One slip of timing or misjudgment of rhythm and the whole piece is fucked. Thankfully, the piece never reaches this point - and instead pummels itself on flawless and mesmeric.
Ex-Easter Island Head are, in fact, the soundtrack of Alice In Wonderland’s clock watching rabbit. Thumping, paw-pound Earth and watch tapping, the chimes of time, purpose and urgency shaking the fur from the brain outwards. None of it makes sense, per se, but follow it like Alice and you’ll be granted a half hours sweet, distracting release from your own tempered existence.
Promise.
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