Mentocome - s/t LP

Well this is a bit special; an ostensibly lost album of prescient and unfathomable productions recorded in Düsseldorf, 1992, arcing from dankest post-industrial murk into elegiac chorales, damp rag dabs of bass and mildew electronics that have been more or less lost to the mists of time ever since. It comes highly recommended for anyone snagged by the deep & mysterious time-dilations of Werkbund or Konrad Becker’s Monotonprodukt, or if you’re just obsessed with that lost pocket of time in the early 90’s, before the internet fully kicked in, when artists pushed boundaries with no obvious audience in mind. Trust - don’t miss this if you’re into anything from Tolerance to Nuno Canavarro, Conny Plank and Holger Czukay to CHBB.

Formed in Düsseldorf, Mentocome were Rainer Rabowski and Axel Grübe. Rabowski ran the cult Klar!80 label; both played in Roter Stern Belgrad and both were pivotal in the NDW/post-industrial electronic world of West Germany in the 80s (think CHBB, etc). Grübe was even a studio apprentice for Conny Plank for a period. Their sole album reaches into the furthest recesses of the imagination in a way not touched by many other records we can think of, perfectly capturing that phase of enervated post-industrial murk in the early 90’s filed in our minds somewhere between Coil, Werkbund and Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’, with an added, pungent whiff of Conny Plank and Holger Czukay’s one-off Les Vampyrettes diamond.

It’s the sort of stuff that stains the mind with a sulphuric tang, unfolding from slurred & screwed choral tape loops into gunky bass and curdled 4th world ambient gestures in the final parts. They reserve the right to go wherever they please in the spaces between, with a hypnagogic logic that seeps out in passages of hazed and noirish drone vapours, prepared piano, and a silty flux of spectral radio waves and extended instrumental chamber works, as evinced in the juxtaposition of cranky atonality and quizzical keys on the A-side’s 5th enigma, eventually leading to clandestine bits of hobbled offbeats and wheezing industro-jazz on the flipside’s third movement. 

Curious ears will have a field day with this one; something to get wrapped right up inside and fade out to, a real precious find.
(boomkat)