on Jar Moff's "Commercial Mouth"

by Kevin Colpean

Destabilizing music, for Jar Moff, is not an excuse to be incoherent. Instead, his first LP, the two song Commercial Mouth, acts as a magnet, picking up hyper-fractured samples of pop songs, to form new geometric rhythms. I’d call the shapes collage-like, but the pieces themselves are no longer reference points. Whatever pop remains is unidentifiable. What listeners can latch onto, though, are hip-hop beats overtopping the fragments.

The restrained downtempo beat in the first track, “Tziaitzomanasou,” is a spaceship sending its passengers through Kubrick-like voyage. Cosmic whirrs, laser beeps, loops of rewound transmissions . . . the travelers are far from Earth. The near psychedelic chaos reminds me of Acid Mothers Temple, but more aware of sonic momentum and when to change movements. The spaceship is also breaking down. At times, the beats collide with rhythmless industrial clangs, halting the tempo in what feels like frantic malfunction, until a new beat churns into play. The battle creates tension. Over twelve minutes of this struggle plays out, until the track fades into the distance, indicating an off-screen continuation instead of a resolution.

Track two, “Commercial Mouth,” is more recognizable as instruments playing music. After a brief layering of looped samples, the song eases into free jazz. Sax, drums, and piano take over, while still retaining the hip-hop/cosmic subtext. Track two achieves a level of depth that pure space rock, heavy psych, or downtempo hip-hop often lack. Moff isn’t simply asking his audience to zone out; he’s asking them to consider the outcome of flooding speakers with the remains of de-contextualized/re-contextualized music, as if he’s rapidly flipping through nothing-to-watch TV and wants to know what we see in the cadenced blur. For a first album, Commerical Mouth shows Jar Moff to be an ambitious artist—more than just another person behind a computer mashing together songs.

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Kevin Colpean has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cal State San Bernardino. He has worked for several literary magazines including Bravura and Ghost Town. He has an extensive music collection that always seems to be just a few albums way from completion.