spf: paul's mcartney

Recorded in Oakland and San Francisco last year, SPF is Adam Keith (Cube, Mansion) Will Isengole, and Dave Easlick (Jackie O Motherfucker). There is something both listless and challenging about Paul's McCartney, something of our time, and something that, in that respect, demands to be taken seriously, and made sense of. The music which follows is capricious but interesting, its themes transitory, and its coherence provided primarily by the percussion. Nevertheless, its melodies, when they appear, are disarming and lovely. In only the first few minutes of the recording I hear: a siren, a jammed printer, church bells, the beeping of an heart rate monitor (a profoundly sad sound, if one is in possession of the right experiences), and finally what sounds to me like an homage to the tension producing minor key synth sounds that constituted a certain staple of horror film scores in the 1980s. Excepting the last as nominally musical, there is a tendency here to aestheticize the non-musical. This is not unique to the present case, of course. For some genres, e.g. industrial, it is the very reason for being. However, in that case the transfiguration of non-musical elements into musical ones is obvious; in this case, the process is less complete, and so, it seems to me, the final product more obscure.