Gallery, ReviewDitch This MagazineMarch 09, 2020gallery, live, melbourne, Odin Imaging, Nathan Goldsworthy, Review, mono, Max Watts, Solkyri

Mono + Solkyri @ Max Watts 06-03-20

Gallery, ReviewDitch This MagazineMarch 09, 2020gallery, live, melbourne, Odin Imaging, Nathan Goldsworthy, Review, mono, Max Watts, Solkyri

words: Jennifer Rouse
photos: Nathan Goldsworthy @odin.imaging

Mono (12).JPG — Review

*“…A splendour in simplicity as is the splendour in our own complexity..”*

There is a certain type of devastation that comes with post-rock music that, at times, is so indescribable you really do have to feel it first hand. There is arguably no better sensation, however brutal, than the striping away of an ego and basking in a wall of amplified empathy. Mono (Japan) for a long time now, 20 years give or take, have been bearers of this experience and more. From churches to dives, with orchestras and strobe light lit fog hazes, and from most parts of the world. They have shaped a path on a bell curve from classical beginnings to their more recent heavier undertaking with Nowhere Now Here.

The last time they toured Australia in 2017 was on their Requiem for Hell release which was an album based on Dante’s Inferno, which makes it hard to imagine that they could achieve an even more somber tone with Nowhere Now Here on their 20th Anniversary tour in 2020. They presented a beautifully enthralling offering at Max Watts early this March, bringing Jo Quail and Sydney’s Solkyri along for the ride - who, in brief, are particularly good in their uplifting and fast paced moments. Making for an interesting transition into Mono’s set.

The dawn call of ‘God Bless’, sounds and a hush falls. The Quartet is enclosed in a fog, like a darkness rolling in. Arriving with the melodic sound of ‘After You Comes The Flood.’ From there a journey towards the light.

There is a certain expectation within the post-rock music, as with most genres, to keep excelling upward from the last stand point. However, I feel post-rock music is like looking at a white painting. At first it is seemingly easy, but as you look closer and let yourself be immersed in the expanse of white you start to see subtleties, complex motion, purposeful alterations - much like in a sound scape. Mono’s white painting doesn’t try to trick us or show off or try to one-up itself. It is ever building on the base sound to give us introspection as progression. A splendour in simplicity as is the splendour in our own complexity.

So, standing there in a crowd arching forward for the next anticipatory stroke and subsequent meditative calm we imbibed Mono whole heartedly. Ending our journey as witnesses to a swaying mass on stage. All wreathing together as the wall of sound encumbers all, reaching out into the room. Enveloping everything in its path. Til with a flick of a switch it’s lost again to silence.