Search - Club d'Elf :: As Above: Live at the Lizard Lounge

A Trancy Rhythmic Coup d'Etat!

01/30/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is an amazing debut! This live double CD includes some of the best, most adventurous and "out-there" musicians playing today. And these guys are all so in tune with one another, so much hanging on one another's micro-rhythmic, micro-tonal every word that it's hard to believe it's a live CD - - yet it is! Mike Rivard is a serious gatherer of soulful musicians and a composer who will gain increasing notice. This is not for the Top 40 crowd, but if you have the heart and brains, and above all the rhythmic intuition to "get" what's going on here, you will have a hard time taking it out of your CD player. Highly recommended!"

Tryptamines on disc

A. Janjigian | Cambridge, MA USA | 02/14/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Lather, Rinse, Repeat."   Scholars place this canto among the oldest known recorded musical texts, and the only one of its kind to top the Billboard charts in two separate millennia.   Owing to a bitter copyright dispute, that beloved song is not included on As Above, the debut CD release from the Arcturus-based Club D'Elf, but don't let that discourage you from plumbing its cavernous depths, where novel (and Gnostic) delights await your ears.   Formed in a base of lanolin and tocopherol, the true origins of Club D'Elf remain lost to history (though there are those who suggest compelling evidence that it began as an improvisational side project spun off during Saul of Tarsus' Zealots-era studio sessions).  Its current incarnation was birthed anew in the reptile house of our local zoo, and is the brainchild of  Micro Vard, the cult's reclusive and mercurial Chief Adept.  Vard, a supposed 33 degree initiate of the Sisterhood of the Inordinate Prudences, is an inveterate scatologist with a penchant for charity beachcombing (as well as a rumored $13-a-day expired-discount-vitamin habit.)     Whatever his predilections, of this there can be no doubt: he is a skilled aural traffic controller, guiding grooves on and off of the runways with the swan-like motions of his red and orange flashlight wands.  Peering though his golden speculum into alien worlds few dare even to contemplate, he returns with a glistening message of hyperbolic transcendence, a call to arms for the pacifist in each of us.   Call it Eschatological Realism.  Necro-romanticism.  It caresses your skin like a wet potato sack.  It grows like vines around your ankles; it is more plant than human.  It sings.  In As Above, as elsewhere, Club D'Elf turns wine into water, transmuting a mere intoxicant into something pure, elemental.  In a word: Essential.   Put it this way.  Some people want their music hot and steaming, others prefer it clinically sanitized, like a sports stadium men's room.  Me, I like my music like I take my coffee: unfiltered and stone cold.   So grab your glue guns and your water-wings, kids, 'cause it don't get any colder than this."

The next best thing to being there!

04/06/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"These cats are simply the coolest. There is nothing quite being at their Lizard Lounge shows, but if you want to simulate the experience at home, screw in some red lightbulbs, invite a bunch of smokers over, pop in these discs, and crank up the volume. And when the groove hits you, start dancing! D'elf spins a cosmic, mystical journey that defies rote categorization. They will stimulate your creativity and (re)awaken your joi de vivre. No praise is too great for they who call themselves: Club d'Elf!"