Commencing is an ideal title for a five-record retrospective because it refuses to behave like an ending. Volcano the Bear assembled twenty years of tapes, CD-Rs, live recordings, compilation tracks, alternate versions and unfinished pieces, then arranged them as five new albums rather than a chronological museum. The result opens a door into the workshop while the machines, jokes, rituals and half-invented instruments are still moving. Sixty-four tracks pass across more than four hours, yet the box feels less like a completed archive than evidence that Volcano the Bear were always beginning again.
The group formed in Leicester during the mid-1990s when Aaron Moore, Nick Mott, Clarence Manuelo and Daniel Padden became frustrated with ordinary musical limitations. Their solution was not to replace one fixed style with another. They created a situation in which folk song, free improvisation, post-punk, tape manipulation, theatrical performance, chamber music, noise and deliberate foolishness could occupy the same room. The playful titles and absurd voices never mean the music is empty. Humor becomes a tool for escaping inherited expectations before those expectations can determine what a violin, drum, Dictaphone, trumpet or human mouth is supposed to do.
The earliest material has the volatile charm of people realizing that private amusement can become a genuine artistic method. “Yak Folk’s Y’are” resembles a damaged sea song remembered by someone waking from anesthesia, while miniature pieces such as “Tubular Smells,” “BB” and “Fog Slicer” make seconds of sound feel like objects discovered in coat pockets. “Pretty Flower” turns repetition and tape pressure into something both comic and oppressive. These recordings preserve the instant when an idea was still surprising to its makers.
Commencing becomes more impressive because it does not hide the unevenness of that development. A conventional anthology would isolate the recognized achievements and remove the strange fragments, failed jokes and transitional experiments surrounding them. Volcano the Bear understood that those fragments explain how the achievements became possible. A forty-second interruption may contain the seed of a later performance language. A ridiculous title may release the players from dignity long enough to find a new rhythm. The archive treats wrong turns as part of the map.
The nonchronological sequencing is crucial. Early cassette pieces sit beside later recordings without being introduced as primitive ancestors. Live performances interrupt studio constructions, then a compact folk melody may emerge after several minutes of clatter. This arrangement allows the band’s methods to appear across time. The same appetite for unstable rhythm, warped song and collective surprise persists even as the playing becomes more controlled and the available instruments expand. Development is heard as accumulation rather than improvement.
Across the middle records, Volcano the Bear’s invented folk music becomes especially vivid. Titles such as “Ballet of Swedish Mountain,” “Elephant Bingo,” “Woman Who Weighs Out the Wool” and “The Middle Farm” suggest traditions from countries that exist only while the track is playing. Familiar gestures appear, including a bowed phrase, processional rhythm, rural melody or communal chant, but their origins remain scrambled. The band does not imitate an authentic village tradition. It demonstrates how quickly a few sounds can cause the mind to invent one.
That approach keeps the group separate from both conventional folk revival and sterile avant-garde technique. Their music remains handmade, bodily and socially awkward. Percussion rattles as though gathered from a kitchen or shed. Voices wheeze, mutter and suddenly become beautiful. Instruments do not always enter with professional certainty, but the uncertainty creates interaction. One player proposes a world and the others decide whether to inhabit, decorate or sabotage it.
The fourth record contains some of the set’s most fully realized transformations. “Halo Onna Volcano,” “Fat Monarch,” “Aflame,” “Night Fig,” “Baltic” and “Curly Robot” move through ritual percussion, warped chamber music, unstable song and unexpectedly tender piano without needing a single governing genre. By this stage, Volcano the Bear could change emotional climate almost instantly while remaining unmistakably themselves. Their identity was no longer a sound. It was the confidence that any sound could be absorbed if the group approached it with enough attention and nerve.
The fifth LP turns toward live material, where the visual and theatrical elements can only be inferred through voices, abrupt dynamics and audience-space acoustics. Tracks such as “Amateurs Blind,” “Crikey Biscuits,” “Did You Ever Feel Like Jesus?” and “Hairy Queen” preserve performance as social risk. The band’s concerts were temporary environments in which costume, gesture, improvisation and comic confrontation could redirect the music. Without seeing the stage, the listener hears the instability created by bodies making decisions in public.
Aaron Moore and Miasmah founder Erik K. Skodvin spent roughly two years shaping the box from dozens of hours of recordings and multiple versions surviving on cassette, MiniDisc and CD-R. Some unfinished pieces were completed during the process. That labor gives Commencing an unusual balance between preservation and creation. The sources remain marked by their original formats, but the selection and sequence turn them into a new composition. Archiving becomes another form of improvisation, performed slowly through listening and hundreds of decisions about what should sit beside what.
The physical edition makes that labor visible. Five individually sleeved black records sit inside a screen-printed burgundy box with track notes on the backs, accompanied by a fifty-page book of photographs, flyers, artwork and writing. Nick Mott’s graphic elements, Irmgard Mann’s cover image, Erik Skodvin’s design and contributions from the musicians turn the set into a portable history of a culture made by hand. The limited edition of five hundred copies resembles the small-run cassettes, painted sleeves and self-released documents from which much of the history grew.
Commencing ultimately argues that an archive need not make a difficult band easier to classify. It can preserve the difficulty more accurately. Volcano the Bear were funny without being novelty music, improvised without being careless, theatrical without abandoning sound, and prolific enough that mistakes and revelations often travelled together. The box does not separate those qualities into respectable and disposable piles. It shows how one depended upon the other.
The title therefore becomes a statement about creative life. After twenty years, five records and sixty-four tracks, Volcano the Bear are still commencing because their central achievement was not a perfected style. It was the repeated construction of conditions in which something unforeseen could begin. Anyone who encountered the early cassettes, Volucan CD-Rs or theatrical concerts may hold another fragment of this enormous story, and this is exactly the kind of archive that becomes richer when those fragments are returned.
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