Packaging Notes
LP edition is 180gram audiophile vinyl pressed at Optimal (Germany) packaged in a 350gsm jacket with artworked inner sleeve, both printed on uncoated paperboards, plus a 4 inch round sticker. All artwork by Efrim Manuel Menuck. Includes 320kbps MP3 download card.
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Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria are SING SINCK, SING presents the first volume of songs forged from this febrile and fertile merger: an antifascist poetics of sound that unspools across five crushing, keening tracks driven by thick sweeping drones and ostinatos, battered by inscrutably searching, ricocheting vocals. Anguish, yearning, and desperate conviction combine in these saturated survivalist electro-hymns, for as long as the power stays on to overload the amplifiers.
Tracklist
1. Do The Police Embrace
2. Fight the Good Fight
3. A Humming Void An Emptied Place
4. Joy Is On Her Mount And Death Is At Her Side
5. We Will
Running time: 00:30:38
Packaging Notes
LP edition is 180gram audiophile vinyl pressed at Optimal (Germany) packaged in a 350gsm jacket with artworked inner sleeve, both printed on uncoated paperboards, plus a 4 inch round sticker. All artwork by Efrim Manuel Menuck. Includes 320kbps MP3 download card.
Description
Efrim Manuel Menuck – founding member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion – and Kevin Doria from Growing, Total Life and Hiss Tracts, are now officially a duo. Menuck recruited Doria to help him translate his acclaimed 2018 album Pissing Stars from the studio to the stage, and the pair have been touring under the Efrim Manuel Menuck moniker for the past year (often with Doria’s latest solo project KGD opening the proceedings). They’ve also been co-writing piles of new material, diving deeper into whirling maximalist electronics, still shot through with Menuck’s incantatory singing awash in plaintive distortion and hope.
Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria are SING SINCK, SING presents the first volume of songs forged from this febrile and fertile merger: an antifascist poetics of sound that unspools across five crushing, keening tracks driven by thick sweeping drones and ostinatos, battered by inscrutably searching, ricocheting vocals. Anguish, yearning, and desperate conviction combine in these saturated survivalist electro-hymns, for as long as the power stays on to overload the amplifiers.
WE STARTED PLAYING TOGETHER IN THE DARK WINTER OF 2017. 6 OSCILLATORS AND 3 LARGE AMPLIFIERS. DROVE THRU HELLA BLIZZARDS AND/OR HEATWAVES JUST TO LAND IN SMALL ROOMS, VIBRATING. A SERIES OF SHORT TOURS, A PROCESS OF FIGURING OUT WHILE EXHAUSTED WHILE HURTLING WHILE WORRIED. EVERYTHING ILLUMINATED EVERYTHING DESTROYED. WE LANDED IN MEXICO CITY LAST FALL, WROTE THIS RECORD QUICKLY WHILE THE POLICE DROVE ROUND AND ROUND. FIRST SONG IS SELF-EXPLANATORY. 2ND SONG A STATEMENT OF INTENT. THIRD SONG IS AN EMPTY SPACE BETWEEN TWO HIGHWAYS. FOURTH SONG IS ABOUT A MURDERED FOREST. FIFTH SONG INSISTS THAT WE WILL WIN. HOLD ON. THO THESE TIMES ARE DARK TIMES. HOLD ON. – E.M.M./K.G.D (SING, SINCK SING)
As the title suggests this is also an interstitial album of sorts, an identity-bridge that leads away from Menuck as ‘solo’ artist and towards SING SINCK, SING which will be the new band name for future work by the duo. Thanks for listening.
Credits
Recorded in Mexico City and in Montréal, autumn 2018.Mastered by Harris Newman at Greymarket, Montréal.
Intro vocals on “Do The Police Embrace?” sung by Johanna and Ezra.
Additional vocals on “Do The Police Embrace?” and “Joy Is On Her Mount And Death Is At Her Side” by Robin Wattie.
“Fight The Good Fight” lyrics by Michele Fiedler-Fuentes & E.M.M.
Dedicated to Dirk Hugsam, last of the sad german outlaws.
Reviews
"The duo’s first album together is practically blinding in its radiance. The result feels as overwhelming as anything in the Godspeed/TSMZ canon… “Fight the Good Fight” and “We Will” are companion affirmations of perseverance—tender, comforting folk hymns that sound like they’re being beamed up into a UFO. As is the case with all the songs here, Menuck’s voice is only intermittently legible, his words momentarily acquiring definition like a radio station your car stereo catches as you’re driving between cities. But on SING SINCK, SING, that obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. As Menuck and Doria remind us, there is still beauty in this world—you just have to cut through the dark clouds to find it." – Pitchfork (7.8)
"'Fight the Good Fight' thrusts listeners into an angelic squall while an ominous presence lumbers below; 'A Humming Void An Emptied Place' finds radiant common ground between competing oscillations; and 'Joy Is on Her Mount and Death Is at Her Side' wrings hands over a murdered forest while trying to acknowledge the new life sprouting from the ruins. These are tearful anarchist synth sermons for a landscape all but completely fucked by snake oil slingers, their demoralized goons and the noise surrounding them, and our next steps forward won't be easy. Even 'We Will' — the album's parting song that "INSISTS THAT WE WILL WIN" — is framed in bleak terms, Menuck crying out while he and Doria power down the machines in a gloomy pulse. But the noise surrounding our most glaring problems exist precisely because there are still voices seeking to challenge the status quo. Through reckoning with it, Menuck and Doria found a new creative partnership, and each return to are SING SINCK, SING provides that crucial reminder while offering a shoulder to cry on." – Exclaim
"Its swells of sounds, all interlaced and tightly wound around each other, produce a dizzying effect as the washes envelope you with their persistence and doggedness. All of the album’s five tracks share the same aural characteristics of minimalist and pulsating synth drone, languid vocals and swirls and ripples of mechanised undulations and the album feels like a complete body of work rather than a collection of songs... A triumph of an album." – The 405
"This is some of Menuck’s most vital music in years. The opening polemic-as-hymn “Do The Police Embrace?” suggests an amped-up take on Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” – an entreaty to the oppressor’s humanity that swings like a pendulum between dread and rapture… In 2019, instead of doubling down on the gloom, are Sing Sinck, Sing plants little flowers of optimism. Perhaps there’s a model of sorts here: when hope’s all but lost, collective action and dogged persistence might just offer the long path to victory.”" – The Wire
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