By now, the circumstances regarding the recording of Last Clouds have reached the level of myth. For a week beforehand the band slept little, instead embarking on an epic binge fueled by psychotropic drug consumption. Trailing off into hazy waking periods filled with lucid dreams, the musicians prepped themselves for the approaching chaos. On the eve of the first night, a torrential thunderstorm arose, leaving the four landlocked in the studio amidst reports of flash floods and hail. And after the tumultuous sessions, during which their producer collapsed in a nervous breakdown, an accident in the factory caused the vinyl lacquer to catch fire, torching most of the machinery and all but roughly 100 of the press run. It seems the gods themselves had conspired to destroy Mirza's extraordinary epic.
Okay, so none of the above is true. But if you have even a trace of drool dangling from your lips, you've been diagnosed with obsessive collector's syndrome. The fetish for owning racks of rare records seems even less justified in these Internet days, when digital media pretty much ensures that a copy of just about any piece of music will live on in some form. So you've got to wonder about the merits of any rarities collection-- does the material stand on its own as art, apart from the needs of sonic anthropology? Case in point: Last Clouds, which actually collects a hard-to-find twelve-inch released by Mirza on their own label Autopia back in 1996, along with other previously unreleased jams. Critics have been calling it the finest document of the now-defunct band, but the lo-fi noodling here smells a bit more like leftovers.
Mirza's four members included Glenn Donaldson on guitar and Steven Smith on drums, both of whom now feature prominently in California's Jewelled Antler collective. Unlike the careful cadences of their work as Thuja, Mirza was all about loud, psychedelic rock. The disc kicks off with "Nostalgia," which accurately characterizes the feeling invoked as an epic peal of guitar suddenly bursts from the two-minute build. The doorbell buzz of the bass guides the flight back down to a bed of cymbal crashes. Echoes of Thuja can be heard on "Charity," which moves at a slower, blissed-out cruise. Donaldson drops ringing stalactites from his guitar, lulling the listener before the amped-up end section. It glows like Mogwai's deceivingly contented moments, or even the Smashing Pumpkins' old live jams.
The first four songs (which comprised the original EP) were recorded on 8-track, bringing a satisfactory level of detail as well as the appropriately rough edges. "East," in particular, doesn't suffer at all-- the heavy pedal-fed guitar lines spiral around and around and eventually converge in cacophony. But the other seven tracks are basically a handful of improvisations recorded on 2-track cassette between 1995 and 1998. They're all extremely visceral and energizing, but the sound quality is poor and the atmosphere isn't much different from a Cul de Sac album. Again, beneath all the fuzz and strange time signatures, this is essentially rock music, and you can expect each song to end in a freakout. It's the ambling along the way that makes things interesting, as with the ghost-in-the-machine feedback on "Pomegranate" and the orange swaths of distortion colored by the tunings on "Dust Crushed from a Moth."
I'm most fascinated by "Acts/Volcano of Birds," which seems to be two separate sections conjoined by tape edit. The first absolutely blisters out of the speakers like a bizarre take on hardcore punk, or an attempt at covering To Live and Shave in L.A. Still, eleven solid instrumentals won't make it to the top of many wishlists. A lot of the musicians reading right now have probably done similar things in the studio and aren't rummaging through practice tapes looking to release a compilation. Last Clouds will be a nice treat for psych-rock completists, but improv purists and others curious are encouraged to move right on to Thuja's two amazing albums. Another option would be Steven R. Smith's recent solo album Lineaments, where the soundscapes are tempered by a greater degree of patience and silence.
