Al Karpenter

Featuring: Mattin

*300 copies limited edition* Al Karpenter expands on their Post-Genre Punk approach reaching a new level of maturity. In fact, we can say that “Greatest Heads” is Al Karpenter’s “Remain in Light” from Talking Heads in the sense that it is also their fourth record, heavily based on production and is influenced by Afrobeat in distorted ways. This record contains elaborated liner notes by Eoin Anderson and features very special guests: “ “ [sic] Goldie, Lisa Rosendahl, and Mikel Xedh — a deeply important musician from the Basque Country who collaborated with Al for over a decade and who recently passed away. This record is dedicated to him. 

If Adorno wrote “To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is Barbaric” in 1949, Al attempts to answer the difficult question today; what kind of music can be done in the face of a genocide? Al Karpenter invites Brigitte Fontaine, Brecht & Artaud to improvise a protest song in a dark cellar in Berlin shouting against the current silencing in Germany of people who are pro-Palestine

The audience gets sucked by the layers of histories while hearing ethereal ethnic sounds, music from Saturn, beat poetry, spectralism, tones reminiscent of Robert Ashley, infinite melancholy and lamentations with echoes of 70s free jazz re-imagined as revolutionary potentials for a future to come. Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini & Mattin play with restrained intensity mixing electronics, noise, abstract beats and garage rock with a conceptual approach and desperate anger; African Head Charge meets Akauzazte.

A deeply emotional conglomerate of a thousandmusics, claiming a profound truth; we are all karpenters of life. Or as Jérôme Noetinger said after seeing the band live at the Ears We Are Festival in Biel/Bienne this year: “All Karpenters = all Joseph = all father of God = all God = no more God then. Freedom in the expression of one chord.” A giant leap.