“Statu Nascendi”, available via SIGE Records and Daymare Recordings, is the band’s first full-length since 2011’s “Mare Decendrii”! The full record is available for your listening pleasure below.
“Statu Nascendi is the band’s first full-length since 2011’s Mare Decendrii, though that isn’t to imply that Mamiffer has been quiet for the last three years. Since Mare Decendrii’s release, Coloccia and Turner have released a collaboration with Chicago noise experimentalists Locrian, teamed up for split releases with Texan soundscapers Pyramids and Finnish art metallurgists Circle, and issued more than a few limited edition cassettes. If Mamiffer’s self-imposed exile to the rustic enclave of Vashon Island in Washington’s Puget Sound wasn’t enough to lower their profile, their dearth of live appearances and their gravitation towards old formats for their releases helped solidify their stature as a clandestine underground unit.
And then Mamiffer did something uncharacteristic in the fall of 2013: they did a large club tour opening for the majestic French black metal band Alcest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group opted to further distinguish themselves from the more metal sounds of the evening by shedding auxiliary members and reducing the band to its core of Coloccia and Turner. While Mamiffer has always eschewed rock clichés, they parted ways with even more conventions for the tour—drums were excised, distorted guitars were kept to a minimum, the use of space and repetition were pushed beyond the realms of the average metalhead’s attention span. The result was a 40-minute set that conjured the restrained minimalism of early Low, the stark territories of Blixa Bargeld’s solo work, and the textural sensitivity of Fennesz. Upon finishing the tour, Mamiffer returned to the Pacific Northwest and tracked their set live at Avast Studios with Randall Dunn (Earth, Marissa Nadler, Sunno)))), on November 16th, 2013. The resulting four tracks are Statu Nascendi.
While Statu Nascendi’s four tracks span 37 minutes, Coloccia is hesitant to view it as the band’s third proper full-length. Rather, she sees it as a “transitional album to the full-length coming out next year.” Statu Nascendi keeps to Mamiffer’s ongoing theme of humankind’s deep ties to nature, and then delves deeper to explore the nexus of life and death, the significance of matriarchal blood lineages, and the purging relationship between birth, rebirth, and exorcism. The percussive element to Mamiffer has been virtually eliminated on these four songs. Not only are drums completely absent, even Coloccia’s percussive piano lines are kept to a minimum, with ethereal washes of guitar, organ, tape loops of field recordings, and Coloccia’s hypnotic vocals serving as the foundation to the songs.”
– Brian Cook, October, 2014
Singer/pianist Faith Coloccia began Mamiffer as a solo project, but it’s telescoped to include collaborations with everyone from Locrian to Circle to her more constant companion, her husband (and former Isis frontman) Aaron Turner. That Coloccia-Turner core has delivered Statu Nascendi, Mamiffer’s first full-length in three years, and it’s a four-song expedition into slow-moving melody and aggressive dreaminess. One of those songs, “Flower of the Field”, is a particularly lulling specimen of Mamiffer’s uneasy ambience; like a flower unfolding to reveal its teeth, it combines Coloccia’s gossamer chants with Turner’s serrated drone. Statu Nascendi is meant to be a warm-up for a more ambitious album set for release sometime next year, but “Flower of the Field” doesn’t need any sort of hope for the future to make its point. / Pitchfork
One of the most common explanations for electronic voice phenomena (EVP) is cross-modulation, which is what you hear, for example, when an old record player picks up the signal of a local radio station. Parapsychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive, who literally wrote the book on EVP, dismissed this explanation by saying that he never heard music when listening for ghosts. But even if he had, why would cross-modulation be its only possible source?
Further supporting the good doctor’s counter-skepticism, if spirits can indeed communicate with us from the great beyond, then who’s to say that they can’t perform music for us as well? Or at least play us some of their favorite tunes? And freed from the physical constraints of the material world, they’d surely have very eclectic tastes.
Perhaps then their playlists would resemble the musical mindset of living, breathing, Seattle-based wife-and-husband duo Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner, whose new Mamiffer LP Statu Nascendi sounds like it actually could’ve been recorded by a dead married couple. (And I mean that in the best way possible.) In compiling their guest mix for Tiny Mix Tapes, Aaron noted: “We purposely left out anything from any artists on our label — it’s obvious we love and support those artists, and we were actively looking outside of that for this mix. Otherwise it might’ve been mostly SIGE bands!”
I’d only add that this mix is best enjoyed through headphones at night in complete darkness, and if while listening you experience any instances of EVP, try not to panic. If you do, Tiny Mix Tapes shall not bear any responsibility for whatever happens next. / TinyMixTapes
