Your Ultimate Urban Fantasy is Martin Bisi's follow up to the remarkable Feral Myths and continues that albums obsessions, it also follows on from my review of the new album he produced for Clone that I posted yesterday.
The album opens with Manhattan Local Train a bitter twisted, quad tracked melodica led song, about the despair of normal working-class people struggling to get by while Billionaires treat them with distain, while doing everything they can to fuck the world up. The Ray Manzarek style melodica from Joan Hacker drives this on, Martin gets angrier at how shattering it is to watch where the world is currently headed.
No SUN In Berlin Templehof it's been blotted out by climate change, just black dark skies, weird synth clashes, odd synapses twitching, you try to find a way back to the days when the future was so bright you needed shades, rather than a bunker to survive it. He gazes out at the abandoned airfield, imagining it as the prefect site for a music festival, with as many of the acts he has ever been involved in turning up to perform, or they find a way to escape.
Your Ultimate Urban Fantasy is certainly not the one we are currently living through, the current fashions in urban planning are distressing Martin as much as they distress many of us. How to make things sustainable and still fun, how to make cities feel safe without never ending surveillance, where have all the cool record shops gone, why do music venues close so early now, what's gone wrong and how do we fix it.
Transit Hub Extraordinaire is distressed travel nightmare, your trying to catch the next train and all the other travellers are in your way, you try not to knock anyone else flying, weird cadences, odd percussion like the noises of trains in the far distance, Mind the gap, hear those mantra announcements, the horror of the 15 minutes city, like life reduced to a Warhol quote, at least he hasn't had "See it say it sort it" burned into his brain like Londoners have.
Masterplan For Retaking Williamsburg the battle lines are drawn, the incoming lovers of glass boxes must be made to leave, the old school fun and games needs to come back, no he doesn't want lines of junkies waiting to score, but we do need everyone housed and clothed decently, food for all and a fairer society so that Williamsburg will once again be an exciting place to live and create as it once was, while the avant garde soundtrack to the despair of what it's become hopes to drive out some of the yuppies.
Find out more at https://martin-bisi.bandcamp.com/album/your-ultimate-urban-fantasy https://www.facebook.com/martin.bisi
