Did you know our most popular set of articles are The History of Math Rock? It makes sense – not only did Will and Nikk absolutely knock it out of the park with care and research, they went out of there way to connect dots across time and space and helped people understand that if you break things down far enough, everything is math rock.
Then again, everything kind of rounds itself out into common time. It’s almost like the reason the complexity exists at all is to serve the simpler, grander, more elegant inclusivities to the point it all feels existential. It’s hypnotic bands like Fling II that really make us think about that.
The reason we brought up the History of Math Rock is because there are actually a couple kraut rock mentions in there, even math rock adjacent ones like Pneu. If that’s your thing, or if you love records like Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air or Dream Weapon from Genghis Tron, there’s a high chance you’ll enjoy Fling II. Transportive doesn’t begin to describe it – check out “Ilia” below, the first single from their upcoming album 3, arriving August 21st via We Are Busy Bodies.
According to the Ann Arbor band, “Some things are best when they’re new, like a sweatshirt before the first wash, but some things are best just how you remember them, like the perfect order of Korean food. On ‘Ilia,’ Fling II is just like they’ve always been, returning to trawl the familiar FM shoals of harmonically open integers, 8-bit bells, and lush string pads for 6 solid minutes of Mark Snow for Deadheads.”
In their press release for “Ilia,” they also gave some surprising insight. By its very nature it worships repetition and texture. Bur rather than something mechanical being imitated or a fantasy wasteland being explored via the impossibly slow turning of knobs, it turns out some of the music is after something more specific: “‘lau’ is a loose ode to the time I’m pretty sure I saw Laurie Spiegel in Tribeca feeding a pigeon while I ordered a cortadito.”
We can’t even imagine. But we can listen, and we like what we hear. Also, the record is apparently not made for anyone according to the release, yet we’re sure Laurie Spiegel would appreciate the thought: “In a digital timespace stalked by the shifting, pixelating apex predator of Desire Optimization, fling ii concluded that a humble American neokrautrock n-gon of part-time participants lacked both the resources and domain expertise required to meaningfully compete with the Leviathan of Hypertargeted Urge Satisfaction. Rather than pursue what listeners supposedly want, they identified a marketable capability gap: creating things nobody asked for. The result is 3, an album entirely diegetic to the experience of making itself — a self-contained reflection on process, intuition, and creative drift. A meta-expression of its own creation, the record functions as a purely inward-facing auto-response. An album for nobody in particular, or perhaps particularly for nobody.”
Someone should link her just in case. Regardless, even if we’re not sure if 3 is going to answer our question of if something is in 4/4, but technically never repeats, is it math rock, but we’re looking forward to hearing them out next month.
(Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here as well. Don’t let the bastards get you down!)