2020! Now it can be told: the charade of a world without new Magik Markers records (six-plus years!) has finally ended. In these times of contagion fables and hacky blockbuster n95 disaster imagery IRL, Markers emerge again like three Lazarus from their three individual firmaments, just in the nick of the end of time.
What Magik Markers do best is listening, and as John Shaw, Pete Nolan and Elisa Ambrogio worked with the tunes, they heard something taking shape. Less a style than a spirit - a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention. Because man, in this economy? Friends, am I right? Making music. It's all we've got. There is no more contemporary, they say, only emergency. So, here we are with results, the murky and public airing of songs, improvised and planned.
2020, recorded and slowly mixed in the first humming tinnitus years after Trump was elected, feels like an animal response to the intellectual luxury of despair. It explodes like a dream. We can all be forced into wage slavery, the dreary fears of our own mortality and the tender traps of love, compassion and family; this record, in eternal Markers fashion, stands as proof that work born out of the unconscious can transcend the individual concerns of meatsackery, and commute purity and relief in the untethered ether that we all contain.
A pure strain of joy that only the Markers can summon, "CDROM" is reckless but copacetic, the 'song' coming complete from a jam distilling Claude Cahun, Bottocelli's Venus, Neil Young, A Cask of Amontiado and working at Target into a rant about feeling trapped by class/your own brain and how romantics end up with figure skaters and coffee percolators. Magik Markers rub upon their roots, art-noise jamming their way into non-linear song-sense and raw, beautiful music all at once.
Like damp concrete made up of the collected wet footprints of every single night since last we heard these Magik Markers. The results are amazing, sometimes, dare it be said: magical.
