Perpetual Motion Machines (Music For A Film) by Days Between Stations
Release date: November 29, 2024Label: Self-Released
The genesis of this story for Days Between Stations’ founding members keyboardist Oscar Fuentes Bills and guitarist Sepand Samzadeh worked on the music for a documentary about in the mid-2010s. When the music was reaching completion, after having creative differences with the film’s producers, the duo received an offer they couldn’t refuse. They offered an opportunity to release their music as a “proper” album.
The result is the band’s latest release Perpetual Motion Machines (Music for a Film). Listening to their score-like assumption, you feel as if you’re walking through the illustration and pictures that Bourdier envisioned throughout his structure. It’s almost like something straight out of either the adult-illustrated fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, or Alejandro Jordowosky’s surreal masterpieces El Topo and The Holy Mountain.
When you hear a title like Perpetual Motion Machines, it sounds like a cult classic 1970s flick that is perfect for a Friday and Saturday evening at Midnight showings. The music itself has a beautiful, gentle, surreal, and spiritual guidance the duo has brought to the table. And once the music kicks in, you know you’re in for this IMAX adventure that’s waiting for you.
From the Kraftwerk turned David Bowie-like approach from the Autobahn and Low-era texture of ‘Intermission 4’ to a walk in a desert-like ghost town with a pin dropping momentum throughout the ‘Stone Faces’ coming upon you, it becomes a reflection of looking back through the past and present, and seeing what the future lays ahead for you.
It suddenly becomes a booming post-punk late ‘70s, early ‘80s approach in the last minute of the piece as they vision what the 25th century will be in the years to come before delving into a mournful sermon for the ‘Unearth’ to begin inside an abandoned church to bid the last rite to their loved ones.
The opening 3/4-time signature of the accordion doing a dance celebrating the ‘Waltz of the Dead’ brings to mind Edgar Bischoff’s accordion score he did for Jodorowsky’s short film in France originally released in 1957 entitled La cravate (The Transposed Heads).
Durga McBroom lends in her angelic, soulful voice to the forefront by closing out the album with the ascending wonders of ‘Being’. It uses the Bowie approach once more, channeling the arrangements of ‘V2 Schneider’ from the Heroes album. Its always a good sign when the duo channels the Berlin-era of Bowie’s three albums in the late ‘70s and bits of the Krautrock genre thrown into the mix where they vision themselves recording this track in ’79 to ’80, getting the new wave genre into a standstill. Not to mention a nod to the Alan Parsons Project’s ‘Sirius’ thrown in the mix.
A perfect imaginative movie inside your head that gets better and better to see what the duo will think of next. And it’s the journey that prepares us even more repeatable viewings to see what clues and mysteries that left in store for audiences to go see again and again.
