La Géographie sans Regret (George Christian & Mehata Sentimental Legend) is about exploring emotional grounds, exhilarating here, melancholy there, dark and tortured there, but without regret. Each musical piece seems to have originated from an emotional reality which is expressed in written words and transformed with the same intensity and emotional and moral ambiguity into musical language.
As a collaboration, George Christian was able to go beyond language barriers which could trap him into such territories, and was able to communicate it to Mehata Hiroshi. Mehata Hiroshi was able to match it both musically and with his visual artwork. His visual artworks, likewise, have the depth, sparkle, horror, and exhilaration expressed in the music they made.
Two young artists show us what it is like to be young, risk taking, treading on water, mud, solid ground sometimes, but throughout it all, without regret.
---Wilhelm Matthies
A haunting collaboration from two emerging artists from Brazil and Japan. Sheets of noisy harmony, shimmering textures, microtonal explorations, and voice drenched in reverb seep in and out of existence. Somewhere between avant/noise rock and experimental electronic, this recording is a strange trip that gets better with each hearing.
---Bruce Hamilton
"...a fairly uncanny record, one of those wild collaborative affairs that make you wonder in amazement at the results. The young Brazilian guitarist George Christian clashes his steely howler-mode strings with the Japanese act Mehata Sentimental Legend, who is the visual artist and experimenter Mehata Hiroshi and one who describes their work as “ritual futurism”. It’s a shocking listen; within seconds you’re presented with far too much musical information to digest, as though watching a cine film with double exposures, or even triple exposures. This impression persists for the first two tracks and, apart from a lull into a slightly quieter passage on track 3, doesn’t get much easier after that point; indeed it’s these very raw and discordant qualities that make the work live and breathe for me, and keep it fresh and vital for each new spin. For just about every second of listening, you truly feel like this is a matter of life or death, that something very serious is at stake. Both musicians recorded their parts at their respective homelands, separated by significant distances, and I wonder if the totality was assembled after the fact from disparate parts, a method that is proven to work well, and if that’s what they did it adds considerably to the deliciously jarring experience of the album. Plus there’s the claustrophobic and eccentric mix, which piles all the sounds together as signs of equal value, and obliges the listener to sort it all out in the head. Both of them sing or add voice parts, but as the lyrics are printed in Portuguese I assume that’s George’s voice that dominates on such juddering haunters as ‘Abismo de Cravos’; he admits he is attempting to “test the limits of his singing voice”, and his notes also disclose the very personal exploratory nature of this work, a reconciliation of his own musical history with his interest in contemporary art. As to Mehata Hiroshi, this person is a cryptical mystic type, uttering compelling phrases such as ‘Stem and root emits life to two sides of the same coin’ and ‘Soul, such as magma deep underground that is wriggling’. Right on! The total effect of this slow-raging hailstorm of shrill and metallic sound swirling together with these plaintive howly vocals is palpable, producing a coppery taste in the mouth and inducing an apocalyptic headache of the soul. Not an easy listen and few will work their way past its forbidding surface, but once you’re deep within this tunnel / maelstrom of music you’ll find it hard to slip loose from its intestinal bonds. Besides the wild voices, you should find the guitar playing of George Christian is truly remarkable (when it occasionally climbs its way to the surface of the cluttered mix, that is) and it’s not far-fetched to predict that one day soon he’ll be held in as high esteem as Haino, Akiyama, or Li Jianhong. From 5th March 2013, and highly recommended."
---Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
video for Ultraviolet Soul by AXIAL:
vimeo.com/52628664
video for If I'm Mad as a Hatter... by AXIAL:
vimeo.com/37019378