230 Divisadero - S/t (media)

230 DIVISADERO - S/t
Label: Locust Music
Release date : September 2007




230 Divisadero

230 Divisadero

Locust CD

230 Divisadero's music is uniformly slow but doesn't ever drag, either because the rippling waves of loops, guitar lines, percussion and electronics have their own slow energy, or else the music dissolves into an area where speed simply can't me measured as such. The due of Nick Grey and Matt Shaw, based in Monaco and the UK respectively, invite a wide range of musical comparisons.

Their music is song based - and there are some good tunes on show - but even at their most straightforward they can take odd turns. "Hands", for example, is a pretty song set to a beginner's piano but disintegrates towards the close. They weave found sounds into the spartan keyboard figures of the hushed "Porte-À-Faux", and here they seem set back from the listener, communicating directly but from a distance, like Bark Psychosis at their most enigmatic.

Other comparisons that spring to mind are the long, unravelling guitar lines of Talk Talk on the opener "How I Keep Myself Energised" and, elsewhere on that episodic nine minute song, the rapt concentration of Current 93. But 230 Divisadero have their own strong identity, albeit one that resists pigeonholing. Their approaches to songform vary greatly from late night balladry, to pastoral reveries, to sections where the vocals are echoed so their meaning becomes blurred and indistinct, as on "Lèri Archar". That's a kind of neat summation of the album as a whole, as it passes back and forth across the border between lucid thought and a hypnagogic, dreamlike state.

Mike Barnes

THE WIRE 286 DECEMBER 2007

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Quietly beautiful, lucidly imagined - About seven years ago, when I was just starting at music reviews, Matt Shaw's Tex La Homa EP became one of my first no-name record ephiphanies, a series of songs so darkly, delicately lovely that it seemed impossible that no one had—or would—take notice. Shaw's partnership with Nick Grey, named 230 Divisadero, is utterly different, more electronic, dotted with samples, shimmering with sustained keyboard notes and pulsing with bright organic beats. And yet it is equally beautiful, equally unexpected. It starts with the ten-minute long “How I Keep Myself Energized” a slow-building, multilayered exercise in musical lucidity that sounds, at first, like the more abstract Yo La Tengo cuts. Utterly pop at some moments, yet laced with found sound and split in two by ear-shaking distortion, it is bold without being in the least inaccessible. “Hands”, coming second, is even better, high, chalky piano notes in a duet with ruminating lower tones. Eternity, the song seems to say, is made up of trivial moments, one after another, each perfect and beautiful. “When will you realize that what wastes your time / Is what makes it worth all?” the song asks. The duo can accomplish lovely, fairly conventional folk songs, and yet what's arresting here is the intersection of the beautiful and strange. “Port-A-Faux” is ominous and gorgeous, voices cut to a mutter, and tones allowed to stretch taffy-like over incredible distances. “Now I'm falling… Now I'm falling” Shaw sings, slowly, words spaced, the hiss of space in the background… but how can you tell falling from flying?

8/10 on Popmatters.com


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. After a self-released EP of drone atmospherics, the duo of Britain's Matt Shaw and Monaco's Nick Grey are set to unleash their first proper full-length collection for Locust, who describe the 230 Divisadero as 'transcontinental' - as far as I'm aware they're both still in Europe right? Between the two of them Shaw and Grey evoke a kind of dusky, ambient intensity, tampering with a host of instruments and assorted sound-making devices. The music here is effectively in 'song' format, but there's a far looser feel to the composition of these pieces, perhaps due to an absence of drums and the inclusion of electronic reshaping and abstract production techniques. The looping piano phrase that runs throughout 'Hands' maintains a sense of structure whilst all manner of effects and stray signals lope around it. The slow motion vocal style at times recalls David Sylvian's Blemish in all its emotional resonance and curious detachment from the music, but there's a more ominous, almost gothic tone to what's going on in the background, with bottom-heavy guitar drones that clearly take influence from the Southern Lord crowd. By the time you get to 'Leri Achrar' it's all gone a bit The Devil Rides Out, with woozy, incantatory spoken-word vocals and a gloomy hum of guitar distortion, and as the album progresses from this point it becomes clear that the apocalyptic influence projected by the likes of David Tibet and Steven Stapleton looms over this album. - Boomkat