ARTIST: Tzii
TITLE: Anti Drama Cut-ups
CATALOG #: earsheltering 044
ARTIST LINK: www.myspace.com/tzii
ARTIST COUNTRY: Belgium
LABEL: Released as part of the Earsheltering project
LABEL LINK: http://earsheltering.free.fr
GENRE: Industrial sample manipulation
TRACKLIST:
1_ God Struggles For Your Sins
2_ And Fails
3_ Look! They’re Coming From the East!
4_ And Lose Their Minds
5_ Calling From The Parallel
6_ Absorbed by Fanatism
7_ Is This Your Promised Heaven
8_ Please Keep Me Under Your Protection
Eric of Tzii is one busy man. It happens so many times that upon visiting and revisiting his enormous and ever-expanding body of work that I wish to get the fuck out of the US and be physically closer to the many buddies I am forging fast and genuine friendships with through our art. Though I had the shweeet ass privilege of interviewing Eric back when I wrote for Heathen Harvest [http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20091031170756401&query=.], I was unfortunately left with a rather empty feeling. This was because even though I had given him a good platform to satisfy my various inquiries and [I’ll admit] curiosities, I had seen that he was really as active as anyone could obviously gather from our interview. But despite the fact we don’t talk often, I still feel proud that I know the guy in some way. We’re not friends in the way I am with a certain few that live across the pond, but it is certainly just as important to me to be at the forefront of the work of such a talented, highly artistic, and pleasant person.
But it is not just this shining personality that makes Tzii such a worthwhile entity in the Post-Industrial world. Anyone can stick to the far-left on a keyboard and make dark sounds, and anyone can certainly take a sample and make it sound cool, but I have come to realize that Eric’s strongest skill is that of composition. Sure, the guy has a big home studio filled with both common, and also with unique sound-producing devices, but what separates Tzii from most is the level of involvement, care and attention put into every single detail of a track, album, or as is often practiced for V-Atak, various video works.
“Anti Drama Cut-ups” tells a story of a world that has been consumed by the tragedy of Christianity. But the thing is, it is a good representation of the psychological hold of false belief systems, war, and ultimately, the deterioration of the mind because of these. The title is actually an allusion to the fact that this work was in fact a cohesive compiling and manipulation of many samples as the primary sound source.
What I love about this album the most is that it doesn’t give you a strained effort into using complex synthesis in its build of mood and message. The most disturbing sounds often come form our own mouths. The best examples of this are definitely “And Lose Their Minds” and “Absorbed by Fanatism”. These are two looks into a very demented mind-state that is incurred by the ravages of war. There is confusion in the fourth track, a strong sense of displacement, while the sixth track is a mix of a preaching voice laying out why you should give in to the so called glory of god, a calm voice that is soon tainted with sounds of degradation to Muslim prisoners, telling them that they “are now property of the US Marine Corps”, asking if one is “crying like a Muslim”, and finally, a beautiful recitation of a passage from the Quran, INTERRUPTED by some marine asshole who shouts “Hey! Stop praying!”
I also think its great how the work seems to take on a sort of “past-life” of its own. Many of the samples Eric used to make this collage are pretty old, and its cool how you can see the black and white form the start with “God Struggles for Your Sins”, to the last track, which is a straight maniacal, childish voice that I’m sure was made under the care of Mr. Guy Maddin.
I hate that it is only rarely that I can find albums like this that paint an effective picture with only minimal use of actual instrumentation. Maybe its more difficult to do than I imagine. But what counts is that this work exists and shows us how its done…
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://www.archive.org/details/earsheltering044
ARTIST STATEMENT:
The idea of this album was to do an exercise of collages and cut-ups, mostly influenced by the early collages of Nurse With Wound, Ghedalia Tazartès, Severed Heads, Zoviet France, and more, plus by some of Guy Maddin's films mostly, of course. What's funny is that the text accompanying the release written by the label's owner says that it's a new approach to my work, but the first tracks I made under the name of Tzii back in the 90's were collages. So for me, it's more a back to the roots thing. I like this kind of stuff because it usually tells a story, something... and maybe because I'm also a filmmaker, I don't know, I love when something is told, I'm not so attracted by creation without any sense, impulse, intentions, concept, so this release is like several acts of the same drama (that's why it's titled like that), it's a story. I think the titles speak for themselves but I can explain a bit:
"God Struggles For Your Sins": Here you can hear some violins with thunder....violins are the holy and pure spirit, the thunder is an act of god ]or any superior entity, you can call it what you want] but it's at the same time a menace... then you hear religious chorals [Christians], added with it the sample "drinking, murder, gambling... from suffering and pain". These words comes from a religious propaganda movie, so is god who struggles for your sins!!!!
"And Fails": but he fails, the living creatures on earth don't need him to sin, and they're ending their allegiance by listening to some pagan German song, making monstrous moaning...
"Look! They're Coming From The East! ": The main voice comes from the Guy Maddin movie "Tales From The Gimli Hospital", and it makes a parallel with "Archangel" in which the action is set in Russia.. This eastern reference follow the German one.
"And Lose Their Minds" : but when fighting and crossing Europe, it is not always so easy to stay of sound mind, and nobody knows who's crazy or not. Everybody loses his mind in the general chaos of nature.
"Calling From The Parallel": The parallel dimension. Something can be heard from there, does any living creature knows where and what is this dimension? We don't know, but one thing is sure: everybody hears it...
"Absorbed By Fanatism": Everybody knows that religion is a very important factor in the world order and fanaticism is the disease of the beliefs. All human decency is absorbed by it. Samples come from "The Road to Guantanamo", while at the same time, you can hear on it Christian propaganda.
"Is This Your Promised Heaven": What gets a hold of us is the promise of this heaven, the afterlife, but maybe it's more chaotic and perverse that we think...
"Please Keep Me Under Your Protection": ...we need a guardian angel to survive...
