http://zacamant.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-flesh-mabento-rinbo-remixed.html
I haven’t written an album review in a while.So here we go again. It’s a remix album by the friends(Selfmademusic and Sloum) of online-release kings from Timisoara Mabento. Rinbo is an odd little birdie chirping some chilling tunes. We all know about ghost stories, every culture has its restless souls, its famished specters and angry spirits. The belief in communicating with ghosts has spawned an entire subculture in the 19 century with its own magazines and parlor games. The very moment when positivism, scientism, Darwinism hit the free market economy the newly industrialized world was scarring itself, ready to believe in immaterial substances and ectoplasmic photography. Late 20th century has seen the arrival of exotic ghosts, Japanese, Korean and Chinese ghost characters. From Hong Kong spiritualist cops to ghost girls seeking bloody revenge, hauntology became all the rage. Rinbo is tainted by all these apparitions. Jubokko is a vampire tree and the track has an eerie resemblance to a John Carpenter soundtrack – especially the Prince of Darkness from 1987 (in my mind). Forget the actual unimaginative storyline (age old outer-dimensional evil strikes again).
Important is to keep in mind that it is all about street life and about a peculiar modern fear of homeless people, the economic outcasts, junkies, murky parking lots and infectious disease. Victorian social explorers liked to immerse themselves and literally get their kicks by visiting what they described as an urban hell, the lower bowels of the town and the smog-filled rooms of the London poor. This same fear of “contagion” has deeper roots. More specifically Jubokko is strongly connected with battlefields and the remaining impurity following incessant wars during late-feudal Japan. The whole nature (trees especially) become impregnated with all the bloodshed and war crimes. The idea that life sinks underground and that dead bodies are usual nourishment for other so-called “lowly” living beings is always pretty hard to swallow.
It is not a pensive dreamy state that Rinbo induces, but a nearly 10 minute journey into a frightful, nightmarish monsterpedic cityscape – a recession-hit downtown area that can’t hide its cracks behind glossy facades.
A clear case of Z A C A M A N T!