On their first release since 2013, the avant-rock group forego the escapism of their past work in order to provide a score for our present chaos.
Escapism has long been the guiding philosophy of Magik Markers. The avant-rock destructionists titled their 2013 album Surrender to the Fantasy, a reference to the role of “the unconscious mind” in their music-making. Singer-guitarist Elisa Ambrogio told Interview Magazine that their music is, in part, a conscious rejection of “the reality of your day-to-day existence,” an attempt to find joyfulness and ecstasy amid life’s doldrums. For the better part of two decades, they’ve torn up the tropes of rock and blues history and reassembled them into unrecognizable, otherworldly forms. It’s jarring music, but that’s the point—it’s supposed to shake you free from your normal rhythms and lead the way to another world. On Isolated from Exterior Time: 2020, their first new EP since 2013, they shift this approach; instead of providing an escape to these times, they choose to score this period’s chaos.
Such a disposition feels fitting when much of the world is stuck inside, grappling with the uncertainty of an unprecedented global health crisis and the destabilization caused by its calamitous management by the people in power. It’s only fair that the Magik Markers would attempt to reflect the downcast spirit of the year. A brief piece of writing that accompanies the EP on Bandcamp suggests that the timing of their return is no accident: “[Magik] Markers only appear in times of duress.”
The 25 minutes of music on Isolated from Exterior Time certainly don’t sound like a balm for all the time everyone has spent inside. Like the psychedelic memoir of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent films, they aim for a kind of transcendence, one where truth is gestured at obliquely through surrealism, static, and violence. The four songs are illusory and upsetting—full of spectral harmonies and needly riffs crawling along ominously and overlapping chaotically. “Machines” picks up more or less where Surrender to the Fantasy left off, presenting the Markers in their more song-like mode, offering a few straightforward riffs and some elusive lyrics about fear. But from there the song doubles over on itself; Ambrogio’s lyrics are barely legible as she sings over herself, the song spiraling out into more chaotic thought processes. It’s likely a familiar energy for anyone who’s been cooped up since March; everything starts out normal, but as you spend more time isolated with your thoughts, things can start to get weird.
The rest of the tracks are only stranger. There’s a ghostly round called “Three Guitars” that haunts and creaks in a way that recalls Charalambides’ distressed Americana. “Arms to the Sky” is an echoey, creeping drone that sits somewhere between Spiritualized’s hopeless ballads and the anhedonia of doom metal. However, the record’s most moving moments are peppered throughout the ten-minute closer “Jet Skis (Alt Mix),” a loping, feedback-laden epic that sounds like it got lost in the desert on its way to meet Manuel Göttsching. Unlike the splatter-painted psych-noise that Magik Markers first become known for, it’s gloomy and monochrome, a trudge through the psychic muck and mire. It’s an apt soundtrack for a year that’s been an overwhelming slog. There’s little hope for escape, but Magik Markers make the case that it’s ok to feel a little lost.
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