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Recorded in Oakland and San Francisco last year, SPF is Adam Keith (Cube, Mansion) Will Isengole, and Dave Easlick (Jackie O Motherfucker).
There is something both listless and challenging about Paul’s McCartney, something of our time, and something that, in that respect, demands to be taken seriously, and made sense of.
The music which follows is capricious but interesting, its themes transitory, and its coherence provided primarily by the percussion. Nevertheless its melodies, when they appear, are disarming and lovely. The harmonies, in even shorter supply, are hypnotic. At just after three minutes into the recording there is one such moment. Ex nihilo, a kind of order appears, and the music takes on for a few minutes a quality that is, well, musical.
In only the first few minutes of the recording I hear: a siren, a jammed printer, church bells, the beeping of an heart rate monitor (a profoundly sad sound, if one is in possession of the right experiences), and finally what sounds to me like an homage to the tension producing minor key synth sounds that constituted a certain staple of horror film scores in the 1980s. Excepting the last as nominally musical, there is a tendency here to aestheticize the non musical. This is not unique to the present case, of course. For some genres, e.g. industrial, it is the very reason for being. However, in that case the transfiguration of non-musical elements into musical ones is obvious; in this case, the process is less complete, and so, it seems to me, the final product more obscure.
Paul's McCartney is generally speaking, improvised, sometimes haphazardly so. And the parts that do show a tremendous amount of promise are punctuated by parts which lack any obvious, prima facie aesthetic direction at all, except insofar as chaos and discord actually constitute an aesthetic, which I admit, they do. But just barely. And only in such a way as to draw attention to the transgression itself which forces us to into modes of aesthetic discourse closer to that of modern art than that of modern rock. I can imagine sound objects identical to Paul's McCartney, which nevertheless possessed different aesthetic qualities by virtue of its context. For example, I can imagine a promising young musician who dies tragically, as they so often do, who left behind something like this as a sketch for a future musical project. It would be a brilliant sketch. And people would be right to praise it, as I have its sonic equivalent, for its potentials. – Matt Rabon (excerpt from the liner notes)