AMITURE - MOTHER ENGINE VINYL

Mother Engine began to take form in a dilapidated garage between a sanitation center and a set of train tracks. This would be their laboratory, workshop, and recording studio where they developed a process of working that included a newfound love for sample manipulation. They collaborated with other musicians including Matt Norman (Lily & Horn Horse) and Henry Birdsey, an experimentalist, to bring their production out of the digital landscape of Ableton. Between the tape machine, the amp, the turntable, and the computer, Amiture found magic. Each song is a part of a complex sonic matrix that reflected a vision and a sound neither one could have procured alone, always centered around Whitescarver’s classically trained voice and Goupil’s gritty, tripped-out-guitar sound, merged and then steeped in the traditions of American guitar music, industrial music, and folk melody.

The results are emotional, at times disturbing. On “Dirty,” Whitescarver sings of a last tryst before a lover’s disappearance: “Before you go and leave this town—I want to taste it one more time.” His aching—a recurrent subject—shifts recklessly from lascivious to desperate, against a thumping electro beat slashed up by jagged guitar picking. “Cocaine” is elegiac and haunting; “He is cocaine—He is cocaine—Just like my father,” Jack’s painfully murmuring his sinister Freudian wordplay next to Goupil’s hard- boiled tremolo. It’s on the frenetic warped blues of “Billy’s Dream” that their sculptural process is put on full display. Built from sampled drum loops and a Goupil’s razor-like scratches of guitar, Whitescarver calmly chants “I need remote control—I’m howling in the hole”. His words spiral into a surge of delay and noise that sounds just like the car “Billy” is running away in. Running away from what? The band is careful to never give too much away, leaving plenty of room to freely enter their world of dark American iconography.

It’s Whitescarver’s first breath on Mother Engine’s opener, “Glory,” that introduces and defines Amiture’s astonishing evolution. “I know my shit is pure,” he cries into a sea of rolling guitars and rattling breakbeats. To imagine what shit Whitescarver is speaking of is to imagine an uncut drug, a passion, a memory, a sense of self that whirlpools Mother Engine. Just as much a question of circumstance as a declaration of truth, the band is ready to share a new kind of Amiture, one that is as open to the possibilities of their unified imagination as they are dedicated to the tools and gestures they have spent so long refining. Whitescarver doesn’t let us forget it, and he says it again, “I know my shit is pure."