Tagging Satellites
abstract confessions
Mag Wheel Records/Recovery Recordings

CD Review by Dave Liljengren

From the Bible to Freud to Jung, we've been told that dreams are prophetic, self-revelatory, and important. Shakespeare's Prospero sought to define art when he declared, "we are such stuff as dreams are made on," and he certainly did so, but those nine simple words seem to suggest more, a very modern more. They seem to hint that "we," the universal "we," are built from the same stuff as our dreams. If this is true, then dreams, the relentless cinemascopes of the night which everyone attends alone, are the genesis, or at least the cradle, of our more visible selves.

The ten songs on abstract confessions move with the fluidity and freedom of flying dreams. Voices push forward, punctuate a scene or an image with an intriguing non sequitur such as "eerie fog in my eyes; I hear you, I hear you," from "Five Star Memory," and then scatter in the onrush of the tune's next sonic and verbal adventure, leaving the listener grasping at the bygone lyrical snippet and pondering its importance.

In song, Zera Marvel, Tagging Satellites' singer, songwriter, lyricist, guitarist and bassist, describes the work as "rough accidental insanity formed from Northwest energy," and in conversation she describes it as "Couples Therapy Through Music," referring to the fact that the other half of Tagging Satellites is her "better half" and boyfriend, Graig Markel. Working together in their basement studio the two of them have crafted this record out of the stuff of their lives together. True to the work's title, there is confessional material in the songs-- "Why on earth do I deserve anything that doesn't hurt?" she poignantly asks in "time on my halo,"-- but the confessions are piercingly brief and truly abstract, detaching themselves from the pulsing sonic mix in segments so minute they come across like conversations overheard from a passing convertible.

The disc's overall sound is a vibrant, rock-based experimentalism with a smidge of post-dotcom irony. Synth and guitar sounds ranging from processed and pretty to blunt and raw are woven together into a tapestry without seams but not without an edge. The production sound of the record itself is a-- for want of a better phrase-- silent partner in the whole artistic mix. The sound of every vocal take, drumbeat, guitar solo and keyboard line is painstakingly worked and fitted until it serves each particular song perfectly. Packed with ten vivid dreamscapes and a mystic, overarching, significance, abstract confessions has enough color, fire, fear, anger, and acceptance to feed your dreams for years to come.

Click here to view streaming video of the Tagging Satellites song "time on my halo"

Tagging Satellites Official Site

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