City Dragon - Smokes and Mirrors

City Dragon is Max Kaario, who is part of different bands such as Altersgruppe, Teenage God, ski attic etc. Canadian, he has lived in Paris for more than ten years where he organizes concerts such as cmptrmthmthcs in bars that are always changing and kebabs sometimes.

Smokes and Mirrors is composed of 31 short tracks which flow one after another in a radical way, like musical and poetical cut-ups, arranged like cinematographic sequences where images appear as quickly as they disappear. A glimpse of a fragmented story which then vanishes.

The disc is made out of many noises sometimes saturated, drum machines, synths and pedals meet with recorded sounds of a dog barking, sound of toys, and absurd nursery rhymes one can invent everyday and which tend to join other orphan pop songs. It’s tender, and onirical as well as ironical at the same time and creaky like old computer sounds or circus like themes in a horror movie.

City Dragon also crosses in his disc the furrows of the music of Mayo Thompson with Corky’s Debt to his father, Beat Happening, Alex Zhang Hungtai, some might say Daniel Johnston, the Holy Modal Rounders or maybe a wobbly Steve Reich, and many others but it is never exactly that.

As well as the loops he uses which seem to be sabotaged, lopsided and stretched out to something else before being clearly-cut in their dreamy visions. One could imagine that the record would start spinning and oscillating on the turntable, then fly away like a dragon, you’ve got to listen to it before it happens.