Slumberwood - Yawling Night Songs CD
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• ASP43 - A Silent Place 2009
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“Yawling Night Songs” was produced and mixed by Marco Fasolo (JENNIFER GENTLE) at Ectoplasmic Studio, Cavarzere, Italy. Mastered by Max Trisotto.
Yawling night songs is the first album from the Italian collective called Slumberwood (a bunch of youths interested in music, film and visual arts hailing from the Northern Italy town of Padova) who, after a long apprenticeship in the deepest crannies of the Italian underground, finally took some time to record this Lp – now released for public consumption by the mighty A Silent Place label. Drawing inspiration from artists as diverse as Werner Herzog, Nurse With Wound, Coil, Big Star and This Heat, Slumberwood came to life years ago as a techno-industrial outfit of sort, before morphing into a completely different kind of beast. While still in their early 20’s, band members have under their belt the partecipation to the 2008 and 2009 Stoerung electronic festivals in Barcelona and one of them (rather improbably) even won the Nurse With Wound’s Two Shaves and a Shine Remix Project competition.
From laptops to tree-tops - and mixing acoustic instrumentation with a twisted brand of psychedelia, bleeping electronics and an unsuspected penchant for pop music - Slumberwood slowly developed their own musical language, brewing a weird amalgamation of sounds that immediately set them apart from the rather sleepy current Italian music scene. Recorded and produced by Marco Fasolo (mainman of Jennifer Gentle, the Italian psych pop band currently signed to Sub Pop Records) in his own Ectoplasmic Studio, Yawling night songs is the best introduction possible to their technicolor musical micro-cosmos. Veering from the shimmering krautrock pulse of opener Yahoo to the sheer dementia of second track Galline (Chicken) and covering all the points between, the album sounds like a bizarre concoction of different styles, all filtered through the surprisingly fresh attitude of the band. Slumberwood are equally at ease with the tranquil pastoral beauty of Thru crop fields and the fake-blues froggy gargarisms of the absurd Il Verme Solitario (Tapeworm) - while the majestic Help me Grandpa just smells of woods and starry nights. And if it perfectly makes sense that the last song on the album is the Mediterranean dance of The Bride side, the centrepiece of the album probably is their cover/ total re-invention of Mr. Sandman, the Chordettes doo-wop classic here transformed in a deep throbbing, cymbal-crashing and tragically heatfelt song about loneliness and unrequited love of almost alien proportions. Clocking in a little more than 40 minutes, Yawling night songs is a fascinating compendium of Slumberwood magnificently naïve sound world and a powerful evidence of a small (but quickly growing) musical scene.
"Yawling Night Songs extracts nature’s many melodies, and cacophonies, to create a portrait of the heavily romanticized conception of an enchanted European woods as it exists for the youth of the 21st century….a dramatic interpretation of the Italian woods’ ambience, one that leaves a pretty clear sense of what’s hiding in the shadows, waiting to be found." (Dusted Magazine)