Save Us From The Archon are the sort of dudes I’d want to talk shop with over a cold one. Not only is their music as beautiful as the orgasms of gods, but it is their ostensible appreciation of film and literature that really grabs me (something that is, rather surprisingly, glossed over by the general press). Flicking through their back catalogue, it is clear that SUFTA are cine-biblio-philes, and I sure would love to sit down and discuss Fassbinder, Bergman, Antonioni or, in this case, Milan Kundera (if not only to raise glasses in solidarity to those auteurs gradually corroding with time).
But then, when I think about it, it seems possible that if this were to happen I mightn’t even be able to get a word in. If their music is a manifestation of their personalities, SUFTA probably talk at 1000BPM, changing topics per sentence, spitting out reflections and philosophy left and right, flapping hands about frenetically and then, all of a sudden, fizzling out into a slow dreamy introspection. Only to re-erupt with frenzied interlocution moments later, arms flailing, cultural references smashing against the walls like minigun bullets, tongues flapping about like they’re speaking glossolalia (but actually it’s all coherent stuff that basically makes the sentence I was going to say 50 minutes ago suddenly superfluous).
Why? SUFTA are a band that play fast, and most likely think fast. That’s what seems clear in this lo-fi bedroom playthrough of ‘an unbearable lightness of being’. Guitarists Andrew Cresto and Nelson Brooks shred effortlessly through what is probably L’Eclisse‘s magnum opus, and they’re barely batting eyelids. How do we even deal? To quote The Unbearable Lightness of Being itself: “when the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object“.
You grab SUFTA’s epic 2016 album L’Eclisse via the Tragic Hero Records Bandcamp. Alternatively, you can familiarize yourself with the original work here. Nothing suss.