Anniversary! The quartet with the fitting name Volcano the Bear, which was founded in Leicester in 1995, is looking back on 20 years of working experience in the field of fearless sound exploration. Fearless because the British band tends to go for surprising means in order to investigate into the borders of pop, or music, in general. Their urge to play, sometimes childishly naïve, sometimes almost scientifically experimental, reliably runs at full blast in order to find each track’s fitting strategy. These strategies can involve anything from noise rock, folk, psychedelic, dada-performance, Tibetan sound art rituals, miniature-nonsense-audio books or a collage of all the above mentioned. The collection »Commencing« comes in an impressively elegant box and consists of five LPs, altogether assembling 64 tracks from their career, including lost cassette recordings from limited editions, off-track samples or completely unreleased material. And despite their different origins, the individual contributions actually manage to form five somewhat coherent albums. That’s because for Volcano the Bear, ignoring musical conventions never comes with arbitrariness – instead, their anarchic humor prefers the eccentric, and sometimes the calming. With these guys, you never really know what will happen in the next second. At parts, this can be extremely exhausting; but it never gets boring. They’re best described as ear-openers of the gently violent kind.
Commencing
