The Sun Has No Money

Alien Ensemble's trombone man Mathias Goetz caused quite a splash when he released his eponymous debut LP under his Le Millipede moniker back in 2015 (N 042CD/LP): The multi-instrumentalist's initial offering was clearly something else, impossible to grasp, a musical vessel that carried an almost cosmic kind of song-craft. Followed by remix album Mirror Mirror (2017), it's now time for album number two: The Sun Has No Money. Following an initial warm-up round sans electricity, this new album soon begins to glow: Goetz doesn't need pedals, he boosts circulation by single-handedly playing tons and tons of different instruments - it actually feels like thousands, easily. There are various sonic illusions... and yet Le Millipede doesn't hide anything: He's also willing to show the inner workings, the actual recording process and everything else. In short: he goes meta. Some of these melodies appear to be shadows of earlier tunes, dating back to, say, 1898 or even before that, melodies that were first registered in the Tin Pan Alley publishers' offices back in 1912 or 1917. You'll actually get to see this Alley at that point in time. You'll see the ropes, the workings. Suddenly, you can hear the shadows! Okay, so one side of this street is America. The opposite side: Russia. And smack dab in the middle: Europe. All the back-and-forth that occurs between these two poles ultimately depends on the movement of the sun. You'll get to meet Prokofiev's and Scriabin's ghost, among other spirits, reframed and published by Le Millipede's own imaginary label imprint on the historic Tin Pan Alley. Indeed there are moments on this album when Le Millipede seems to be playing Scriabin's clavier a lumieres, when his performance seems to be based on synesthesia, a wild cross-pollination of colors and sounds. In case you didn't know this: In the States, Prokofiev goes by the name Brian Wilson, and Scriabin's also known as Sun Ra - yet another guy who's usually broke, but gets to spend a lot of time out in the sun. Together, these assorted protagonists ask the people of the Antilles for Mutabor dance-tokens and send postcards to Moondog in Germany, right back into the darkness. Le Millipede controls the very center of this hustle and bustle: going as far as to employ some southern chopped-and-screwed styles, he's 100% current and zeitgeisty!