Last week, we prattled about the mysterious avant-garde extreme metal project, Serpent Column. This week, we are coincidentally chatting about another, however, this troupe revels in an experimental domain wholly distinctive from Serpent Column’s terse and bludgeoning mathcore spliced frenetic black metal. Enter Mamaleek. Mamaleek is a mystifying avant-garde duo helmed by two anonymous brothers from the San Francisco area. They formed sometime in 2008 and have released seven LPs to date. Admittedly, Connor and I are quite green behind the ears with respect to Mamaleek’s amorphous and ever-mutating sound, especially in regards to how they have evolved since their conception and how their latest effort Come and See stands in relation to their back-catalog. Thus, we have roped in an infrequently recurring guest for this episode, Adam, owner/operator of Constant Disappointment Records.

Come and See is an album that seeks “to analyze the emotional impact of the spaces we occupy, the surreal forces behind the appearance of physical reality, and the residues they leave behind.” (source). The album’s cover is that of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project, which was constructed piecemeal over two decades (1942 to 1962), and at its peak, it housed about 15,000 individuals. Through this lens, Mamaleek explores and emits timbres that ceaselessly flood city streets with deafening clamor. Discordant saxophone notes blare like throngs of sirens ricocheting off of concrete and asphalt architecture. Aberrations of desperate shrieks promulgate the erosion of sanity. It’s anxiety-inducing and stifling, yet Come and See manages to simultaneously embed sparks of astounding bliss between their bouts of despondent, smog-laden murk. Be it grooving bass lines, the cathartic blast-beat outpour on “Eating Unblessed Meat”, the shoegazey euphoria percolating within “Cabrini-Green”, or its sundry of surfy flashpoints, Mamaleek continue to shirk categorization. Much more can be divulged here, but so as to not detract from the history lesson and context Adam provides us, we’ll leave it at that. Thank you so much for tuning in!