As recently as February I was so indifferent to the music of a band called Macdonald Duck Eclair that I walked out of their show after listening to only a few songs. Now I find this incredible; it’s hard to understand why I didn’t understand their stuff back then. You don’t always know what you're seeing in front of you is Revolution.Macdonald Duck Eclair is a dialectical band, creating by juxtaposing contrasts: the female singer’s voice floats over the repetitive, mechanical and sometimes harsh techno, a voice that is soft as a feather brushing a foxtail. Sometimes they wade in pop music shallows, but they are best when diving into this sea of hard techno-gentle vocal contrasts. In their first album short short those include the tunes “mac teenage riot”, “texas”, “butterfly in the stomach” and “perpetuel”. Their second album The Genesis Songbook is even better because it has almost nothing but those songs of contrast, as if they’ve realized that’s their sound.
The Genesis Songbook is a wonderfully weird album—Genesis, the first book of the Bible, appears to have given them the inspiration for some of the songs, but clearly not in a religious way. Rather, it seems they used bible-sounding song titles (like “Paradise Song”, “Shepard” and “Le Diable”) as free-association springboards to explore ideas (some of which are pretty far from religion—“Shepard”, at one point, describes an SM master-slave relationship, in that gentle voice of the singer).One day I’m going to have to accost this trio, demanding that they reveal their source of inspiration and ideas. And, alas, they play live only rarely, so next time they do a show, I’m going to stay put and focus my eyes and ears perfectly, as if I’m reporting on the Apocalypse.
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You can listen to some of Macdonald Duck Eclair's songs at their MySpace page. I also play their tunes all the time on Japan Live Radio.
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