Haarvöl – Ridge Of Humming Spoils

The Portugese trio Haarvöl returns to Moving Furniture Records with the last part in their trilogy. After Bombinate and Peripherad Debris they conclude this journey with Ridge Of Humming Spoils.

Ridge Of Humming Spoils

Psychoanalysis refers to the frontier as an empty signifier: it embodies an interior and an exterior. The last album of the trilogy we set out to puts us there. On top of a vast set of remains whispering to us. Remains, because they have been left behind, because they are no longer useful. And yet, usefulness is something that tells little or nothing to us, artists. Quite the opposite. For this very reason, this new album is made up of these testimonies that whisper their condition very strongly to us. From the top of this pile of whispering remains we have achieved something that is precious to us: time, in its three dimensions, and not enclosed in that kind of perpetual present where they want to force us into, in a timeless time.

Here, at the top of this ridge, we can look back and ahead. Because it interests us. Because we want to.

We started the trilogy in a noisy place, but still with views to the center, we walked towards the periphery and now we find ourselves at the top of an empty signifier, on a border metaphor. It would have to be this way in a project where the important thing is the escape from formulas and repetitions: maintaining coherence without falling into concessions has always been our motto. Naturally, as we are at the border, its outside is much more appealing to us (it has always been this way until today. The continuous migrations of the past and of the tragic present prove it so) with its uncertainties and unfamiliarity, but also with the certainty of the difference. Is this not, after all, the appeal of art: that attraction for the unknown? Therefore, we have a certainty that is continually whispered to us by these remains that can be heard now: we will move on to the outer side, of course. The border, here made up of this ridge of whispering remains/humming spoils, has naturally closed the cycle. That is what borders are for: to interrupt, to limit; ultimately, to try to block. In our case, to be crossed affirmatively – as we well know, there are no walls that can prevent it.

We will continue exploring the sounds that interest us: sounds that contemplate time and attention as decisive elements, sounds that can appear as specters, asynchronous, almost incongruous with this time with no time to have time, this autophagic time. But already outside. In a utopia of an exile that carries no form of negativity, it affirms itself as positive otherwise because it allows the necessary distance to a placement that wants to be creatively critical.

Haarvöl “ granite (dramaturgy of hopelessness” from Fernando José Pereira on Vimeo.

One last note for something that sometimes appears in a completely innocuous way: the track titles. That is not our case. Here, just as it has been common throughout the rest of our discography, the titles we choose try to connect the real that surrounds us and that we don’t want to be oblivious to. After all, they embody this whole metaphor of abstract sonorities built up in trilogy, but, very attentive to the real. So is our stated intention to close the record with a small tribute to that remain of an already distant past, which yet continues being present, asynchronous. It is called Éliane. Maybe it’s a synonym of future. Who knows?