Ignatz: III translates the Blues into Pure Sound

Brussels-based psychedelic Guitarist Ignatz is back with his third full-length with Belgian label and concert organisors Kraak3. Again a roughly sculpted, rudely recorded, fuzzy, furious and spaced-out monolith of tremelous riffing and Ignatz’ plaintive, naked and wounded vocals, “III” is an angry statement of intent, which takes listeners back to the days when the Blues was born and to spaces of raw intensity. The first extract to be made available from the record, “The Water” certainly twists and screams with the same nervously cool spasms which have become his trademark and been equally praised at home as by influential international online magazines such as Pitchfork Media. While the audience will , as always, have to discover the key to the the exact thematic backgrounds themselves, the press release to “III” at least provides for a little guidance: “In his usual brain-melting futuristic blues folk psych, Ignatz is calling the ghosts of Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes and Robert Pete Williams, as seen by a adolescent Lou Reed”, K. Berckmans writes, “‘III’ suggests a fictional, unclear and vague story about the deaths of musical genres. It’s breath cold, raw made of carbon and gas. The smell of a wet dog or a badly dried towel. The musical assiociations are reduced to a minimum, unless they contribute to the fictional line, where the tragic is enclosed in the crackling, atonal and repetitive melodies.”