Matthias Chaunu
Masterpiece of post rock/post metal by this band, that I just discovered. Lead me to listen everything they did and was not disappointed
Would love to see these guys live
Favorite track: Regensburg.
The Leipzig-based post-rock band Fargo presents a new album comprising four instrumental songs, each named after German cities, that have the sky shaking, crumbling, dreaming and resurrecting. They wander empty streets and dark houses. Founded in 2012 (and featuring a new guitarist and bassist since 2017), the four-piece uses songs both rousing and somber, intricately and cleverly arranged, to deconstruct a postmodern world that operates through seemingly anonymous power structures. Within Fargo’s convincing dramaturgies, the guitars can sound like pianos, strings or synthesizers, communicating with each other, interrupting each other, and driving each other forward, while bass and drums stoically set the tempo and rhythm. The resulting pieces have a dense clarity and inner drama, clearly harder than the band’s earlier works, and sometimes suggest a secret army marching to defend diversity against simplicity. The complex, far-reaching pieces unfold musical textures which are suspensefully interwoven, distorted and deconstructed in order to let them radiate in a furious finale. Distant relatives include the sound explosions of Russian Circles and the spheric landscapes of Sigur Rós.
The album is dedicated to “Geli.” This was the nickname given to Angelika Zwarg, mother of two close friends of the band and an art teacher and painter who died in 2018 after a long illness. Angelika Zwarg was born in 1959 in Zschopau (a small East German city near Chemnitz at the foot of the Ore Mountains), where she lived for nearly her entire life. This is a place and a landscape that she both loved and hated, appreciated and despaired of—and you only despair of something that you honor immensely and that you call “home.” From these roots she used her art to drive delicately ramified branches into the clouds and into the night sky, where the very same moon shines and illuminates the “Dark Houses” (the title of the 2013 painting adorning the cover).
Like Angelika Zwarg’s intricately varnished paintings, Fargo interweaves musical patterns until a new whole is created. This is something to be appreciated and defended—which is what the samples of Winston Churchill’s famous 1940 speech hint at. Back then, the conservative British prime minister dedicated his country to the fight against Hitler: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Or in Fargo’s own words: “The sample in ‘Pforzheim’ reminds us that murderous ideologies like Fascism, National Socialism as well as their contemporary specters are not defeated by pious hopes but instead demand practical resistance. In that sense, we understand the speech as a plea to act and to resist Fascism, National Socialism and their contemporary manifestations.”
credits
released March 17, 2023
ALL MUSIC WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY FARGO
RECORDED AND MIXED BY ROBERT AMARELL
MASTERED BY MAGNUS LINDBERG
COVER "DARK HOUSES" (2013) BY ANGELIKA ZWARG
ARTWORK BY NELSON
RELEASED BY KAPITÄN PLATTE 2023
Fargo is a german post-rock band from Leipzig, formed in 2012. They typically compose lengthy atmospheric instrumental pieces, featuring layers of effect-laden guitars and heavy usage of dynamics with traces of ambient.
The most austere Russian Circles release yet. But in restraint these tracks find new levels of heavy. Nowhere is this more evident than the closing of the third track, "Gnosis". That shit is savage. Absolutely primal. rettisawesome
Groovy, energetic post rock that is truly one of a kind. GCS does not rely on usual post recipes and instead impose their take on the genre. Refreshing to say the least. I don't know what it is with power trios but they almost always work!!! E_Beaudin
An tempestuous post-rock journey inspired by the existential threat of climate exchange, "Triumph & Disaster" overflows with grace and grit. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2019