The Alps: Jewelt Galaxies/Spirit Shambles

The AlpsSpinning loose livingroom jams and soundscapes into a single microphone come The Alps. With this type of music the album art acquires a strange power to push its aesthetics into the music, to place the sounds into a visual context. The album art for Jewelt Galaxies/Spirit Shambles is gentle and indie-rockish graphic design, like a Jade Tree Records album cover from the late-90s. And so the presentation of the sounds in this skin give The Alps a fairly "lite" and non-threatening feel, which may be the first impression talking, but the impression has been made. I picture poets in ringer-Ts hearing No Neck Blues Band for the first time, then going home and making a record. This is probably an rash and unfair judgement, as the sounds are quite varied with a layered live flow and good song titles. The compositions are loose and sprawling at times, bells jingling and ambient electricity humming in the room. Recorded in stereo though possibly from one stereo microphone, giving it a raw muddy texture which isn't unpleasant. The tight and clean emo design of the artwork seems to have nothing to do with these sounds which it carries inside of it, a contrast which, for me affects my perception of the music. If this were, say, a DIY cassette release with fitting artworks, the pieces would take on a new kind of life, come into the world from a different aesthetic womb, a more mysterious one. This album is reminiscent of spiritual autumn afternoons, friends getting together to loosely tell the age-old story of how vibrations make their way slowly into outer-space. I would be interested in checking The Alps out further, seeing what has been produced in the two years since this was recorded. Perhaps they've found the kind of meditative place that it seems they are trying to reach here. :: The Alps: Jewelt Galaxies/Spirit Shambles - Spekk/A-Musik