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Fly Pan Am – N’Écoutez Pas (Constellation)
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With
all their beady little eyes,
their flapping heads so full of lies
Blame Canada!
(South
Park Parents)
Musically, Canada
has much to be proud of (Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Oscar Peterson,
Glenn Gould) and harbours many unspeakable crimes (Celine Dion, Celine Dion,
Celine Dion), but anywhere that can produce musicians of such outstandingly
consistent genius as occur in the Constellation catalogue has got to be doing
something right.
Founded in 1997 by Don Wilkie and Ivan Ilavsky, this Montreal-based label
has become one of the Indie Dependables (along with the like of Berlin's Morr
Music and Brighton's Fat Cat). The stable is small (only fifteen or so bands)
and select, every one a star, and most sharing members in one way or another
at some time or another. Constellation is dominated, of course, by the awesome
gravity of its stellar locator - the huge, and hugely influential collective,
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in whose studio - Hotel2Tango - N'Écoutez
Pas was mixed.
Roger Tellier-Craig has been steering Fly Pan Am in parallel with his Godspeed
duties since he was recruited in 1998. However, he quit GY!BE last year, and
rumour has it that this will be the last FPA album. There have been two previous
full-lengths (Fly Pan Am in 1999 and Ceux Qui Inventent N'Ont Jamais
Vécu (?) from 2001) which revealed a serious - and seriously dead-pan
- commitment to pushing the experimental rock-guitar boat out as far as it
will go towards the cataracts at the end of the world before plunging over.
It's been a nerve-wracking and increasingly noisy quest (the contrasting of
songs and noise has been an obsessive constant), one requiring great trust
and patience from us wide-eyed listeners, but one rewarded, always, by strange
sonic discoveries and glimpses of alien ways that might or might not be better
than the status quo.
Formerly a quartet, the lineup for N'Écoutez Pas gains a fifth
member and a large number of guest-collaborators, although this is merely
a technicality: at any given moment, you might be forgiven for assuming you're
listening to either half of the population of Montreal gabbling nonsense whilst
honking their car-horns and dissecting their broken household appliances with
amplified angle-grinders, or to a single very obsessed guitarist and drummer
stuck in having to repeat the same bridging riff over and over until the keyboard
player gets back from taking a piss.
There was a self-styled ‘self-sabotage’ or ‘what the’
motif in the last album (ie you'd look up from listening every now and again
and say 'what the...' as it either went completely dead mid-track, or lost
most of the mix or something for a few beats) that, thankfully, hasn't been
repeated here; nor have the more dedicated of the experiments in alienation
(track 3 of Fly Pan Am spends ten of its seventeen minutes in the repetition
of a one-tone stroked interval - B to C - on guitar whilst the metronomic
drummer just drums - and drums - and drums - which actually I find perversely
exciting in a thoroughly nerdish way - sounds utterly pretentious, I know,
but after the seventh minute or so, you really do start hearing something
else); but the dedication to treating the musical rule book like a crusty
paint-brush continues, gloriously, unabated.
The Fly Pan Am experience is like following one of those cheeky zen-trickster-monkeys
into the eccentric cabin of his self-build private rocket: he distracts you
from the edginess of the countdown with his wit and repartee, and then lets
you experience the full terror of the last ten seconds - which end with the
refusal of the engines to ignite. All in cod-French, of course. The final
words of the album are, for once, perfectly clear - a question posed by two
very little girls: "Papa, c'est quoi, le fly pan am?" "Oui,
papa, c'est quoi?"
One clue is hidden in the artwork (Constellation's handmade album covers are
always a joy - a true relic of the punk DIY ethic), where, hidden amongst
the heavily-amended and barely-legible acknowledgements to people like The
Fall and Throbbing Gristle (way to go, Genesis P.Orridge fans!) is the name
'André Breton'. (If, as is perfectly possible, the André Breton
acknowledged here is a Montreal graphic designer or guitar-maker or something,
the following paragraph is embarassingly irrelevant.)
Whereas surrealism has tended to become a middle-class lower-case synonym
for 'a bit weird', FPA evidently adheres to the notion of permanent revolution
in, at least, its artistic form, as originally proposed by M. Breton in Paris
in the definitively upper-case Surrealist Manifesto of 1925. Considered as
the effort to liberate the imagination as an act of social and political subversion,
nothing could be more serious, really, and there's a direct causal chain between
the titling of an album Don't Listen and Matisse's entitling a painting
of a pipe This Is Not A Pipe. There's a particularly French understanding
of the notion of art as 'provocation' - without Surrealism and Dada the Situationists
and the Fluxus Group would never have emerged, for instance - but the downside
has always been an inclination to take oneself (one's Self - the Artist, that
is) terribly, terribly Seriously. Preferably in French.
Alas, unless your French is damn near fluent, the pity is that some of this
record's fun won't read: it's clear, for example, that the series of emphasised
rhymed phrases – ‘on vit...on rit...on suit...on fuit...on fouis...’
chanted throughout the first track are a play of some kind, but that particular
plaisanterie is perdue on me, as is the joke in some of these
incredibly long and arcane titles; I thought titling the intro track on the
last album Jeunesse Sonique, Tu Dors (En Cage) was brilliant (after
I'd worked it out), and I think Ex Éleveur de Renards Argentes
on this one translates as Ex-Silver Fox Breeder, and might be equally
witty, but why, why, why? Fortunately, the fun is only marginally verbal:
the musical rug-pulling is endless, and endlessly inventive.
Continually swooping in and out of the orbits of krautrock, anti-funk, hardcore
punk, and noise, nodding impolitely at such doddering oldies as the Velvet
Underground and Talking Heads, and with Sonic Youth never very far away, Fly
Pan Am nevertheless ploughs a singularly eccentric furrow in the postrock
landscape. The short track preceding the extraordinary eleven-minute ghost-train
ride Trés Trés "Retro" , for instance, consists
of the distantly-reiterated announcement, ‘Le Fly Pan Am’ in a stern
female flight attendant voice as if heard from inside the mouth of someone
chewing gum whilst using an electric razor - and it's utterly mesmerising.
With musical quotes spreading as far apart as Messiaen and Mike Oldfield,
and (dare it be said) a sort of shy exotic lyricism often hovering, barely
audibly, as far back in the mix as it will go, this latest album suggests
a decisive step forward from the preceding two. It's as uncompromisingly experimental
as both, but neither manifests the more willing spirit of engagement that
seems to pervade N'Écoutez Pas. The first two of FPA's albums
display a deliberate and calculated carelessness towards the listener's sensibilities.
The work is deliberately cold, distant, and disagreeable. N'Écoutez
Pas seems to acknowledge that yes, maybe they have been taking themselves
a little too seriously. Indeed, Tellier-Craig admits, in a recent interview
(with the zine 'Voir') that, in this album, ‘...nous avions envie de
faire une musique plus humaine, qui reflétait notre amour pour elle,
plutôt que d'en faire une qui est détestable!’ (‘...we
wanted to make a more human music, that reflected our love of it, rather than
making something horrible!’) Are you listening, Darius?
It would be a great pity if this proved, after all, to be a swansong. Fly
Pan Am have demonstrated, here, a whole new set of capabilities as secret
locksmiths - opening doors where doors aren't usually found, discovering chambers
full of strange things that lead to other chambers full of even stranger things
that challenge the intellect as much as the senses. It's still a slightly
disturbing experience, keeping up with them, like treading on the heels of
a rather bad-tempered archaeologist in a slightly sinister mausoleum, but
worth putting up with for the reward of those strange, strange things in those
strange, strangely beautiful chambers...
October 20th 2004
