Monodrama – Mndrmooaa
To approach a text explaining Monodrama is to take on a genuine challenge. Like Faust when ordered by Mephistopheles to “invent words, now that ideas fail you”, we are bereft of signifiers to describe Monodrama’s music – they are the happiest anomaly of current Spanish music, a band with no apparent reference points in our local scene.
We fall into dizzying spirals, trapped by the weeds, abusing prefixes, invented idioms
and imagined anglicisms, muddying the waters with terms like Chillwave, nu-Jazz, Avant Garde, Ambient, Post Rock, Synthpop, Downbeat…….endless labels which strive to define the boundaries of a terrain which really stretches, ruptures the limits between genres, textures, aesthetics and idioms arising from the jumble of instrumental music, abstract electronica, contemporary jazz, or, simply, improvised music.
Monodrama is three musicians from Madrid, classically formed, dissident of spirit, wild and futuristic of surmise, independent but united by the hive mind that is this project: Alberto Brenes (drums, percussion and sound design), David Sancho (piano, Rhodes, synths) and Mauricio Gómez (tenor sax, keyboards).
As is ever the case with Monodrama, this new album disorients us, confuses and mystifies. On the cover we find flames that seem unreal, howling wolves and night. There is a narrative pulse, a filmic gauze, allusions to lava – that soft lava that Hawaiians call pähoehoe. In fact, you might attempt to define Monodrama’s music as “magmatic” – malleable, enveloping, warm and at the same time, enigmatic, tangible yet indecipherable. With a production and sound design that is highly detailed and precise, Mndrmooaa proposes a trip through misty uplands and lowlands, astonishing landscapes, pregnant with mystery, beauty and unexpected twists.
