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Minghe Morte are an uncompromising trio of multi-tasking musicians, venturing into territory as diverse as drum 'n' bass, indie grunge rock and electronica. There is something disturbingly sinister about the members of 'Minghe Morte'. Whether it be the angry, ferocious expressions across their faces, the demonic glowing red eyes, or for that matter, their insistence that the 'Minghe Morte' is something other than just the name of the band. They serve the 'Minghe Morte' by making clean things dirty; taking the pure and innocent and making them corrupt and filthy.
REVIEWS
"As dark and filthy and noisy as an old mill chimney being demolished, and standing under it as it all comes crashing down. Bloody awesome. File under: deconstruction."
Al Hoffman
"Minghe Morte just ROCK! The music is loud and powerful but full of melody and surprises, the rhythms are complex and demand full concentration from the audience, what else could I ask for?"
Martin Laine
"Abso-blooming-lutely Marvellous"
John Robert Brown
ARTICLE FROM JAZZ YORKSHIRE
“We’ve had a few people say that it’s a very nice name. We don’t explain it,” confides Colin Sutton. "It came from a Thomas Pynchon short story, where a character exclaims ‘Minghe Morte’.” The pronunciation is Ming-Gay-Mortay.
“The translation means screw it to death, which rolls off the tongue - if you don’t know what it means.”
Sutton plays guitar, bass and effects. He’s also the trio’s spokesman. I put it to him that with publicity claiming ‘Ear splitting aggressive metal’, and with a curse for a name, he’s not exactly setting out to appeal to vast numbers of the genteel petit bourgeoisie, is he?
“No, is the short answer,” he says. “We have a tendency to work towards quite complex sounds, not always on the ear-splitting aggressive side. When we get into quieter moments, all three of us work along the lines that if we can be doing something else, we’ll be doing that as well; multi-tasking. If we’re trying to create a musical texture, even a very thin texture, it’s still going to be complex. So, if I’ve got a free hand, I’ll be manipulating my sampler, or doing something else to create a small noise. That’s how the whole group works.”
Is this affected by there being only three musicians in the band?
“Partly that,” he says. “Chris Bussey and I decided to get together to see how much we could do with just two people, hence my use of the bass pedals. They enable me to play bass, and either bass or guitar on top of that, or manipulating samples. Chris has a sampler as well. So we are layering samples, creating huge textures.”
French tenor saxophonist Christophe de Bezenac joined just before the first gig. “He became a permanent fixture. He’s been working with real-time computerised manipulation of sounds. He can pin-point particular pitches, transform that sound, then he can select another pitch and transform that sound a different way. He does a lot of surround sound, where particular pitches come out of different speakers. When you play very fast you end up with a swarm sound; you don’t hear the initial line. I don’t fully understand everything he’s able to do. He graduated from Strasbourg. He is doing that at PhD level at Leeds University.”
Sutton is endearingly candid about the struggle to find gigs. “Our music is seen as a little bit risky. What we do is quite close to pop. We play tunes, but it is quite intense. A lot of promoters don’t want to take the risk.”
Modesty is obscuring the truth here. In a world where New Music gigs regularly attract tiny audiences, Minghe Morte can attract 150-200 people to the Wardrobe in Leeds. “That is an unheard of number anywhere in Europe,” Sutton points out.
His ambition is to be playing festivals, to reach new audiences. On tonight’s showing, judging by the considerable audience enthusiasm, I’m sure he’ll manage that.
JAZZWISE REVIEW (Dec 07/Jan 08 Issue 115)
An obscure Latin curse, nabbed from a Thomas Pynchon short story, translating as “screw it to death” – the name Minghe Morte pretty much sums up the music on this debut disc: confrontational, clownish and clever. Coming out of the ever-creative LIMA stable, it’s a furious collision of incongruous musical ideas smashed up against each other to create gore-spattered car-crash jazz. The influence of John Zorn’s cartoon thrash-core brutalities is hard to ignore, but there’s more to it than that: guitarist Colin Sutton turns out moody post-rock, tricky prog riffage and even dreamy, shoe-gaze indie; and on ‘Mothership Parts 1 & 2’ the trio locks into UK club culture with some supremely funky approximations of drum ‘n’ bass and garage house. But it’s stand-out track ‘Propeller Cage Fights’ that epitomises the band: an intense, scatological burst of violent jump cuts and vein-busting skronk in which an hysterical, lunatic narrator proclaims: “we just want you to gag on our jazz.” It’s the birth of the drool.
Daniel Spicer
