Album Review: TRIO

“…All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration…” – Bill Hicks

I remember reading some article a while ago…
Reading is a strong word, doom-scrolling past a headline more like.
Something about mushroom music.
No capital letter there, not that Australian record label.
Talking about people plugging synths into fungus and recording the music within.
Held it with the same curiosity as a kid who learns you can light a bulb with a potato, or use one to make a clock at home, if your mum would only buy you that hobby kit from Dick Smith.
Though it was kinda cool.
Kept scrolling.

Those fungi-stabbing explorers and lauded experimenters were mere amateurs. Satisfied with only making plant music. No dreams bigger than the now.
Not like vegetable.machine.animal, or at least the human third of the trio, known or not as Mr Sterile Assembly’s Monaghan.

V.M.A.’s TRIO takes symbiosis a step further than some lonely hipster in a scarf standing in a damp forest. Here drums are improvised against the undulating soundscapes produced by a synth hooked to a shiitake, goldcaps, deathcaps, and buttons. Possibly even potatoes and moss, it isn’t clear which vegetable is part of the rotating roster on what track. The drums aren’t played in any discernible rhythm or tempo, of course, or in any rigid human sense or aesthetic. This is a trio after all, and bio-signatures refuse to operate in such quantitative terms.

And the results sound kinda how you’d expect. Alien, Avant-garde, real Outsider Art. Wet. Squelchy. Drums playing on beats and measures others fear to touch. The places between the count. Much like how Jazz sounds to those of us who don’t wear berets. Something for the Works for Loudspeakers archives. For a Warhol exhibit featuring a grainy monochrome Super8 of a doped-up model wearing wet spaghetti and a squid. Something that serial killer from that one episode of Hannibal, where he was feeding bodies to mushrooms to help the victims transcend humanity or something, would listen to all alone in his bed on a dark night.

An admirable experiment, definitely.
Inspired song titles, check.
Listenable, oh no. Out of morbid curiosity, sure, but for enjoyment, percussion over garnish is apparently not my genre.
Could I pick which was what if I played Diet of Knives in one ear and Absence As A Sign in the other? Probably not, and shan’t attempt it for danger of accessing that other dimension.
But as far as attempts to record the life force of an organism beyond the human experience go, this is it. It’s deserving of a headline in some newspaper, if journalism was still a thing. Monaghan deserves more than a “Hey that’s great, mate” for actually attempting it, and TRIO is worth a listen just to see what it’s all about.

But best to keep TRIO quiet for now. When this scene explodes, if it catches on and trends, we’ll see a musician plug their epilator into their DAW and take to their jock itch to produce Spotify’s most streamed track of summer.

Like that brief period around 2010 when Slipknot and Bieber came together as one, when Nirvana and Jackson smelt like Billie Jean, the future is a mash-up. Not between juxtaposed artists with no business intermingling. No, instead as some hybridised chimera of human, machine, and plant. A fruiting Robocop. Treebeard and the Ents run by Skynet, while ridden by a hobbit. An unholy triumvirate. Transcendence.

And in some dystopian future a Bohemian figure disrobes and lays on a pallet in some dilapidated crawlspace, surrounded by the glitterati of the New York scene. For their next, and final piece, the aged artist will strap themself to a modular synth as they succumb to their mortal illness, and the world will listen in wide-eyed awe as they take in the sound of the soul evacuating. The final volts of bioelectricity that made our skeleton dance, converting into heat and sound. It is their greatest work. The best song, never written, and performed just once. The ultimate sacrifice to art.

You can listen to TRIO on the vegetable.machine.animal Bandcamp. Recommended for clearing out a dinner party running too late, or abusing trust when passed the aux cable on a road trip.