LONG PLAY,COLLATERAL SOUNDTRACK
Independiente, Mexico ***1/2
Rating: 71
By Carlos Reyes
He has exposed some notable works under Collateral Soundtrack but none as striking as Long Play. Five tracks of temporal freedom, welcoming moods, waves and beautiful aesthetics for which he mischievously attempts to hook into music’s sunny delight. Not to say Long Play isn’t sumptuous, in fact, it’s very upright, like a city-oriented motif anticipating a sunny weekend to let go its spell.
It’s self-assured, yes, but only as a consequence of its warming pieces. Just like Air France, Collateral Soundtrack works with mild sonic elements and quiet passages. Long Play however, struggles to escape from the hands of background music, feels flaccid at times and time-consuming, but for the most part undertakes anything it sets itself up to. The experience is built through the entire thing, the fact that all tracks are named the same and differentiated by numeric add-ons should give us an indication that we’re dealing with a conceptual EP. “Long Play (Lawn)” is an effective subliminal intro; it takes its time to get going, settles in repetition but handles its departure into thin air pretty well.
Collateral Soundtrack is less ambiguous than say, Antiguo Automata Mexicano or Diego Bernal; it opts to let experimentalism out of the game even if this leads to faulty misinterpretation that we’re dealing with minimalistic music, faulty because it uses its resources at maximum practice. In “Long Play 2, 3 and 4” there are some amazing, almost disturbing/angelical vocal excerpts that end up describing the emerging sounds of their surroundings. Turns out, these vocal recordings are testimonies from people under LSD, some of which you can actually found on YouTube. The recordings go from discussing shapes and colors to justifying the use of LSD to experience religious guidance. Long Play ends up being a very subliminal exercise that’s perhaps not as subconscious as the people under the substance, but definitely bright and luminous for those seeking some sort of light; you hear me Tom Cruise & Jamie Fox.