MAGIK MARKERS - 2020 (Vinyl)

2020! Now it can be told: the charade of a world without new MAGIK
MARKERS records (six-plus years!) has finally ended. In these times
of contagion fables and hacky blockbuster N95 disaster imagery
IRL, MARKERS emerge again like three Lazarus from their three
individual firmaments, just in the nick of the end of time. Never
doctrinaire, on 2020, MARKERS capture a humid kind of chlorinated
heat, playing like children of divorce at the condominium pool:
strangers feeling out games to play, contests to have underwater,
blowing by minutes without noticing at all. There is no more contemporary, they say, only emergency. So, here we are with results,
the murky and public airing of songs, improvised and planned. Like
damp concrete made up of the collected wet footprints of every
single night since last we heard these MAGIK MARKERS. The results
are amazing, sometimes, dare it be said:
magical.
"Surf's Up" opens 2020 and is the
redshift of this record, the reason we
know light bends is because time changes it. We've flipped the event horizon;
MARKERS are now freaked out in space on a
spaced out bomb. It's got a found-it-on-atape-in-the-attic vibe, echoes of CARPENTER's Dark Star, CALE's "Buffalo Ballet" and
CASSINI's namesake satellite taking cold old
pictures alone in the airspace of Saturn's
sexiest moon. Here the MARKERS have found
a reason -- a soft ballad that breaks into
a piano/guitar improvisation that is somehow, in spite of itself, a revel.
Beneath the shifting, roiling surface of 2020, there is even more serious
business going on. What MAGIK MARKERS do
best is listening, and as SHAW, PETE and
ELISA worked with the tunes, they heard
something taking shape. Less a style than
a spirit -- a spirit that had to do with
a delight in friendship and invention.
Because man, in this economy? Friends, am
I right? Making music. It's all we've got.
What matters now is JOHN SHAW's monolithic bass; PETE NOLAN's omnipotent drums
and the magnificent immediacy of ELISA
AMBROGIO's lyrics and guitar.
These songs are too contemporary --
too emergency -- to be subject to notices
of timeliness, but "Hymn for 2020" feels SO
timely, the clean comfort and hot/coldness
of this 2016 composition predicting the
aseptic now. Maybe we're biased, but we
wish it went on longer. We could listen to it forever.
Like when WINSTON and JULIA fuck in 1984, this 2020, recorded
and slowly mixed in the first humming tinnitus years after TRUMP was
elected, feels like an animal response to the intellectual luxury of
despair. It explodes like a dream. We can all be forced into wage
slavery, the dreary fears of our own mortality and the tender traps
of love, compassion and family; this record, in eternal Markers
fashion, stands as proof that work born out of the unconscious
can transcend the individual concerns of meatsackery, and commute
purity and relief in the untethered ether that we all contain.
It's been argued that mushrooms are the aliens among us; the
space invaders we wait for pant quietly beneath our feet and in
our dinners. These MARKERS, MAGIK by nature, have built 2020 in
this same unassuming way, slowly, their imagination persisting,
fighting like fungii through the cracks in the sidewalk of late
capitalism. That work, from all of us, can thrive and survive until there are more mushrooms than sidewalks. It only takes a few
years. "There will be no other end of the world," poet CZESLAW
MILOSZ said; and here we are at 2020.

Vinyl release of Magik Markers - 2020 (Vinyl). Released through DRAG CITY and available on LP.