- The Giant Swan member's debut solo album uses playful, fragmented electronica to explore tragic loss.
- When Harry Wright isn't making explosive, churning hybrids of punk and industrial techno as one half of Giant Swan (a group that often feels more like a 21st century answer to Suicide than a dance music project), they're making even stranger solo music as Mun Sing. Rooted in deconstructed club, their EPs Scissor and Balloon were maelstroms of spliced vocals, rubbery synths and skittish percussion. This disorienting style takes on a conceptual weight in their debut album, Inflatable Gravestone, which explores the sudden death of their father.
Given the techno flavour of Mun Sing's disjointed drums and synths, we always expect them to resolve into a steady, familiar stomp. This sense of resolution is suspended in Inflatable Gravestone through unexpected shifts in tempo, texture and mood. This is best observed in the synth opening "Waiting In The Car", which breaks into a quickening storm of lurching bass and stuttering vocals. Just as this all begins to cool amidst subdued, wistful chords, the whole track cuts. The song feels like it's always slipping through our fingers, expressing the struggle to make sense of tragic loss.
Despite this volatility, Inflatable Gravestone never feels entirely devoid of logic and order. Throughout patterns that at first glance seem completely random, there is often a suggestion of order that teases the listener. Initially, for example, the erratic changes in pitch and speed of the melody on "Spirit And Legacy And Muckiness" might appear completely irregular, but as the section continues, this is gradually understood as a misshapen loop.
Mun Sing links this disorientation to different shades of grief: most clearly in the trio of "Inheritor," "Gliding" and "The Poison Garden." "Inheritor" is a slow, nightmarish ambient piece, looping deep piano notes and groaning bass to express crushing anguish. The same piano and bass is then heard in "Gliding" amidst fast and agitated deconstructed club, illustrating how grief can turn to rage. When these sounds finally reappear amidst the brighter production of "The Poison Garden," the song, with its placid, piano-and-vocals lament, illustrates the clarity the griever might eventually achieve.
Inflatable Gravestone furthers this exploration of grief with its strange playfulness, illustrating the role humour can take in coping with loss. Mun Sing's vivid, plasticky synths endow tracks like "Mercy To Your Cadence" with a cartoonish quality, evoking balloon sculptures (also conjured by the album's title) being twisted into shape. Manipulated samples of laughter appear throughout the album. In the title track, layers of laughter are twisted into synth tones. How much of the earlier tracks' synths, we might wonder, are also just warped giggles?
Humour is not the only coping mechanism Mun Sing explores in Inflatable Gravestone. Their lyrics for several tracks, sung by MX World, explore grief's relationship with spirituality. "The Poison Garden" highlights Mun Sing's father's struggles with addiction, with MX World singing of "an enemy in the self, waiting to be fed." Carried on a gorgeous sweep of high strings, the line "to trust oneself is to trust God" conjures the spiritual advice delivered at both funeral services and rehabilitation programs like Narcotics Anonymous. This draws an illuminating parallel between coping techniques for addiction and loss. Spiritual imagery also shapes "Helhest (Azrael Smirks)," reframing the mythological Helhest—a three-legged horse portending illness and death—as a symbol of life and transformation. Over bright, joyous instrumentation, MX World sings of it galloping "in circles until the wet earth churns… and the sky is clear." Here, Mun Sing presents grief as having its own kind of vitality, by affirming their strength of feeling for the bereaved.
While Inflatable Gravestone is a disorienting listen, it articulates its ideas with nuance and sensitivity. Mun Sing's bracing, esoteric style proves itself capable of expressing weighty emotions: illuminating the dark, complex subject of grief.
Tracklist01. Waiting In The Car
02. Squabble
03. Spirit And Legacy And Muckiness feat. MX World
04. Trebuchet
05. Inheritor
06. Gliding
07. The Poison Garden feat. MX World
08. Spider
09. Mercy To Your Cadence
10. Helhest (Azrael Smirks) feat. MX World
11. Inflatable Gravestone