Borbetomagus - Songs Our Mother Taught Us (Agaric Records, 2003)Throughout the 80s and 90s, there was more or less a release every year or two. However, in 1997, Borbeto release Live in Tokyo and the final collab CD with Voice Crack. Then silence for about 6 years until we get this album.
Donald Miller moved out of New York to New Orleans in 2001. Even with the distance, the band says they experienced a considerable slowdown about 5 years prior to Donald's move, which is exactly around the time the group recorded Live in Tokyo.
They also allude to the fact that it was difficult to draw out the audience in NYC to more than one big show a year in this Paris Transatlantic interview,
https://paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/borbetomagus.html.
Songs our Mother Taught Us is a collection of live recordings from a brief tour in the United Kingdom that the band did back in 1999. The first track was recorded in Glasgow and the second track was recorded in London. There unfortunately aren't any real liner notes to provide any further details other than a thank list of friends who helped put it together. I would have loved to have heard a few anecdotes from the tour. Ah well.
The first track from the Glasgow gig has quite a bit of manipulation and effects that took me by surprise. It works well! Feels psychedelic, and unlike much of the earlier releases. Donald's guitar is very present and up front, and there is definitely string scraping, and I swear almost bluesy twang in the first minute or so. Great track, but it goes by incredibly quickly even though it's 11 minutes long.
The second track, the London gig, is more of a beast. A 34+ minute performance. There is more of the heavier electronic manipulation heard in the first performance here as well. The first few minutes are more traditional horn trilling, but then the saxophones and the guitars start to bend and distort in unusual ways. I would also guess that they are pushing all of their signals through a single amp like they started doing on Experience The Magic. Everything feels mangled together like the signals have been squeezed through a thin mesh wire. More than any other release before this, the effects and manipulation take center stage to melt the guitar and saxophones down into a mangled mutant sound.
Definitely not the most harsh or feral performance from the band, but unique in the way that it sounds very fried. All of the signals from the saxophones and guitar are battling for dominance and all of the while, their sounds are being manipulated, bent, and contorted in unusual ways. They seem to have found a new kind of ugly!
