Words by Jason Lee
Photo by Kaz Yabe
I wanted to be physically erased and start over again. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be there. I guess I wanted to be nowhere, I wanted to listen to my brain talk inside of nothingness. I wanted to be untouchable and have no need.
— David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
They’re something both deeply unsettling but also exhilarating about being “betwixt and between” for more than a moment—metaphorically floating in space unmoored from stable “positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom [and] convention” as anthropologist Victor Turner once put it describing a state he called “liminal,” a state of being strongly associated with music and rituals around liminality…
…and if you’re looking for a band on the New York City scene with a knack for capturing this uncanny “liminal” sensation in sound I’d nominate the Brooklyn-based trio Meviu§ who for five years running have quietly released a new single at 11:59pm on December 31st each year and how much more “liminal” can you get than releasing a song straddling two years if you listened to it right away at the very moment we’re all collectively counting down looking over the precipice of the new year and who doesn’t sometimes wish they could live inside such a fleeting moment of suspended animation forever, an unspoilt full of anticipation before anything’s had time to go wrong moment, a moment at once about looking forward to future days and lamenting losing days one after another…
…and even if you can’t remain in that moment forever you can at least listen to Meviu§’s New Year’s songs on repeat and remember what it felt like sitting inside that moment including their latest one from 2023-24 entitled “Mission Bells” which sees singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist D.Kasshu—working alongside bandmates Blaise Dahl on guitar and Steph Moon on drums with Cassie Ramone occasionally filling in on guitar—being “spun perpetually” in a manner that “can’t be brought to a stop” all while being blinded by “pulses of light…trapped outside trying to fight my way in” with “the future setting in”…
photos by Christin Gabriel
…with music that likewise feels like being held in suspended animation—all floaty ethereal textures pulling upward but held in check by heavy, throbbing low-end frequencies acting like musical gravity or check out the glitchy breakdown part of the song starting at 1:37 that sounds like it’s turning itself inside-out morphing from one sonic dimension to another without an ultimate endpoint which was supposedly almost the case with “Mission Bells” itself as in the song lingered for a good 5-6 years between initial conception and completion not to mention how the song’s all about navigating liminal states of being and larger processes of transformation or one could make that argument at least as hinted at by D.Kasshu below:
Musically, “Mission Bells” started its existence as a demo made in Death Valley High‘s tour vehicle in Europe in 2016, back when D.Kasshu was the lead guitarist for the San Francisco-based post-hardcore band on a multi-national tour with post-punk legends Killing Joke. During the time, Kasshu was experimenting with incorporating lower heavy tuning into the then-bedroom electronic shoegaze lo-fi project that was to eventually become Meviu§.
“Mission Bells” is now the 5th New Year’s Eve single in a row from Meviu§. Initially, the idea of doing an annual NYE release came out of a desire to have some consistency, a way to polish up older and unreleased material, and an ongoing joke that listening to the song at its time of release, 11:59pm, would be a way to both close out the old year and welcome in the new one. Lyrically, the song finds itself referencing California, and the violent history of the bells that line the El Camino Real…
photos by Jason Lee (not me, another Jason Lee!) a.k.a. The Silent Brotographer
…bells which “evoke the state’s violent mission history and symbolize land theft” from Native peoples living between two incompatible worlds so if you reside in Cali maybe take a ride down historic Route 101 with the song at full volume not even thinking about your destination if any; or if you reside in or around NYC catch D.Kasshu a/k/a Meviu§ on the decks tonight (1/20, 11PM, TV Eye) as part of a Factory Records tribute celebrating Haçienda post-punk and rave…
…and again in a couple week, more specifically February 8th, when Meviu§ plays their next NYC full-band appearance alongside longtime co-conspirators Orange Peel Mystic, Safe Houses, and Nuclear Family Fantasy at none other than Bushwick’s World Famous Alphaville so catch ’em now before you’re too washed out from who knows what later or before AI takes over the entire music industry with betwixt-and-between post-human cybernetic facsimiles and we’ll just leave it there for now, now that we worked in all of Mevius’ songs to the hyperlinks..