MaeBeaNot – involuntary recollections

MaeBeaNot – involuntary recollections – EP Review

If I learned anything at all from reviewing MaeBeaNot’s record drifting away from reality last year, it’s that there is some music out there that is way better to be left to the hours past midnight.  It might seem like a bit of a tall ask, but I suppose I’d fire the concept right back at you and ask, is it though?  What if I told you that mindset, time of day, stress level, work/life balance, mood…I mean, ALL of these things matter so much more in HOW we listen to music than whatever pair of headphones you think is the best this month.  As individuals, we thrive in places where we’re set up for success.  Believe it or not, the reception of music and art quite often follows a similar rhythm & pulse, as in, there literally are better times in a day to listen to certain types of music more-so than others.  Feel free to test my theory right now and have a look over your own collection – I bet you’ve got something in there that’s perfect for daytime…maybe something for nighttime driving too fast on the highway…something that’d be the right choice for a wedding, or a funeral…maybe you’ve got something you can’t even listen to without all the lights on in your house so you don’t get scared.  And maybe, just maybe, if you’re following my theory here…maybe putting yourself in the right setting can be the key to unlocking how music SHOULD be heard.  Maybe there’s no other way to listen to something like involuntary recollections than to put it on in the wee hours of the dead of night.  The right setting can make music a more sensory experience.

Especially in cases like these, where you’re dealing with one of the delightful oddities of the independent music scene.  With the distant piano floating in on the wind as you listen to “finally leaving” start the record, with closer footsteps, closing doors, and car motors driving away, you’ll find this opener from MaeBeaNot sits comfortably in the space between the beautiful and the bizarre.  As an audiophile, I can certainly testify about the effectiveness of texture in MaeBeaNot’s music – I remember that being a major factor in the songs from drifting away from reality, so it made perfect sense to my ears to find the use of space and ambient sound heightening the experience in such an organic and quizzical way.  You don’t come across many tunes like “finally leaving” that aren’t intros or interludes.

Whereas you might have found “finally leaving” to be more pleasant than you might have assumed it would be if you’d heard tunes from MaeBeaNot in the past, “gazing at nothing yet it stares” should help in giving you what you likely came for in listening to involuntary recollections.  We get pretty Twilight-Zoney here with the sound, but hell yeah, just like you knew I would be – I’m here for it.  What else would have me up at three o’clock in the morning, gently typing the skin off my fingers?  Personally, I absolutely LOVE it when music can be murky and mysterious…maybe even threatening in a strange way, like how a song like “gazing at nothing yet it stares” feels like what you might hear before the sounds of Stephen King’s The Cell turned everyone into walking zombies…I mean, it’s kind of neat when music can actually seem legitimately DANGEROUS, isn’t it?  “gazing at nothing yet it stares” feels like we’ve pried open the portal to a whole other place and/or time…and while there’s something tangibly peaceful about it at times, it’s also got that like, spellbinding quality to it that captivates your attention span and has you wondering how much say you really have in the matter about how much you’re listening to this.  Maybe MaeBeaNot is casting a spell on us in real time and we have no idea…so we just keep listening.  Maybe it’s been a day.  Maybe it’s been a week.  Maybe it’s been a month, or a year since we pushed play…”gazing at nothing yet it stares” is savagely hypnotic, and it’s undeniably interesting to listen to.

Something like “everything disappears except harmonies” is perhaps a more traditional example, or more closely comparable to another moment you’ve experienced at some point in time.  Like, think of how the opening scene to Ghost Ship came out with that spectacular mix of haunting beauty and the malevolent lurking of something sinister combined…that’s what “everything disappears except harmonies” will remind you of…things like that, or like, the distorted memories of the Overlook Hotel.  Ballroom classics from the great beyond…that’s what we’re dealing with here.  What I like about the way that MaeBeaNot goes about all this, is that we’re kind of forced to project our own feelings into the song as we listen…which makes each experience in listening to it highly unique to each individual.  YOU might listen to “everything disappears except harmonies” and only hear the beauty in it.  Someone else might feel that it’s haunting enough to chill their bones from head to toe.  We could potentially have a bunch of different reactions to it, and that’s always a remarkable part of making art and music.  The goal is to prevent indifference…and I feel like MaeBeaNot always does an amazing job of doing exactly that.  You might like it, you might not, but whatever – you WILL talk about songs like “everything disappears except harmonies,” because moments like these stimulate the mind and make us all FEEL a certain type of way.  Like, I’ll fully admit, I get creeped right out by “everything disappears except harmonies,” but I also feel like that’s precisely what I’m personally tuning in for when I’m listening to MaeBeaNot’s music.  It’s the sound of memories…of past lives…of dreams and of nightmares, all rolled into one experience.

Again, you’ll get to a track like “heavy regrets looming” and you’ll start to understand what I was getting at in the intro to this review.  Like, I’m not saying that you couldn’t put this song on in the middle of the afternoon on a bright and sunny day…because you could, of course you could.  Would it hit in the same way that it does when you’re sitting alone in the dark past three o’clock in the morning all by yourself?  Fuck no!  I’ve been checking over my shoulder for no reason as I typed this review out.  I know the door to the house is locked, because believe when I tell ya, I pushed play on involuntary recollections and instantly checked to make sure I was indeed, alone.  Like, putting this album on and having something just randomly crash in your closet or fall from a shelf could practically induce a jammer if you’re not too careful…so trust me, I’ve already made sure that I’m safe and secure, because MaeBeaNot is more than capable of freaking me right the fuck out.  I LIVE for that feeling mind you, but it doesn’t make it any less scary.  I just happen to think that it’s one of those super cool & rare things about music that you can’t really get out of anything else in life.  Artists like MaeBeaNot are able to taint the entire atmosphere and seemingly distort the serenity and comfort of the life you thought you were living in only moments ago, and twist it into something devilishly disturbing as the music slowly morphs & contorts itself around you.

I’ve made comparisons to acts like K-ORA and GODDAMN GOTHS ON METH to MaeBeaNot before, but perhaps the number one name I was searching for in the archives of my mind was BLOOODHOUND.  There’s a similar way of taking these like…very real and lifelike sounds we are all familiar with, only to change them into strangely sensory vibes we can feel crawling beneath our skin.  In any event, no matter who you might feel MaeBeaNot would be comparable to, I maintain that a show with all four of these names on the bill would be something that the entire world would never forget…just sayin.’  As I listened to the hollow clanks of sound in “rotted memories forgotten,” I felt like you could legitimately make a solid case for an EP like this being a concept record overall.  Maybe this is what it’s like when you go to one of those regression therapy experts…maybe this is the sound you hear as you’re tripping in & out of past lives.  I mean, that’d be hella cool if you ask me, even if was equally fucking frightening at the same damn time.  But you get it…involuntary recollections could easily be about where your mind goes when it’s set adrift…it could be about remembering more than you wanted to or were willing to…it could be about the nostalgic adventures of a malevolent ghoul for all we know…I suppose my point is that the material feels genuinely cohesive and like this set of songs belongs together.  I really appreciate that when things are this far out in left field…it’s like there’s a core concept you can anchor yourself with so that you don’t slip and fall into the psyche of the eternally damned for the rest of your miserable life.  I’ll readily concede that there’s not a ton holding “rotted memories forgotten” together as a song in the traditional sense we’ve come to know, even for soundscape/soundtrack type tunes…but I do think what is here is tremendously enticing, like we’re trying to solve the inherent mystery in the music as we listen.

At the end of the day, you’ve gotta seriously wonder what makes artists like MaeBeaNot tick, don’t ya?  We didn’t all grow up playing in the same sandbox as kids, and a record like involuntary recollections is definitely concrete proof of that.  Some of us were born to blaze our own trails and go our own way, and I think we know that MaeBeaNot fits into that category for sure based on everything we’ve heard so far.  Finishing things off with “longing for days that never came,” with what sounds like voices trying to find themselves in the fog of the ether…MaeBeaNot has made for an excellent spiritual guide into the mouth of madness, and I think we all feel a sense of relief once this set-list is complete & we rapidly turn all the lights back on.  There’s lots to like and/or love here though if you’re into music that steers well clear of the beaten path…I never get the sense that MaeBeaNot is attempting to sound like anyone else, or does anything other than make exceptionally sensory music/moments in time all designed to stir your soul.  Like, “longing for days that never came” sounds like what you hear when you get lost staring into the fire at your campground, listening for the slightest sounds of danger through the snapping of twigs and tree branches, or feeling like you can hear a full-on ritual taking place in the distant dark of the woods.  As to whether or not we’d all agree on what it sounds like or what MaeBeaNot can be or should be compared to…I dunno…but I like to think we’d all agree that it’s absolutely cool to hear music that truly takes you somewhere else in your mind as you listen, than merely remaining confined to wherever the heck you are right now.  The production is stellar, the ideas are relentlessly unique, the atmosphere is THICK, mysterious, and filled with haunting memories that refuse to stop endlessly wandering the halls of our minds…I mean…isn’t that what we’re all always hoping to find when we push play on a record?

Maybe it should be, MaeBeaNot.

Find more music from MaeBeaNot at Bandcamp:  https://maebeanot.bandcamp.com

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