Fiium Shaarrk - No Fiction Now!

It’s hard enough to write a meaningful and useful review about music as it is, let alone about an album consisting entirely of instrumentals. Music’s inherent intangibility is an experience that is impossible to personify and achieve any sort of universal consensus with, as you can only comment on what you are experiencing and hypothesize about what other people will experience when listening to the same thing.

So when presented with ‘No Fiction Now!’ the first word that comes to mind is “challenging”, both to write about and listen to. A six-track album that comes in at a whopping 48 minutes, this is a prodigious and intense exercise in electro-percussive nu-jazz improvisation that’s both puzzling and mesmerizing. Fiium Shaarrk comprises of some seriously high caliber musicians from the Berlin music scene (e.g. one of the members is from electronica group, Icarus), and conceptually they could be compared to Geoff Barrow’s experimental kraut-rock outfit, BEAK>. The disparate aspects of the songs snake around each other in an adversarial fashion and the spectacle is in watching it all unfold while wondering whether something, if anything, will happen. The polyrhythmic beats simultaneously rush towards an unknown destination as they smash into and continue through each other, showing very little regard for the clash and resolve of normal jazz. ‘No Fiction Now!’ doesn’t provide the listener any anchors for them to compare it to music they’ve experienced before and the result is frightening as you are essentially blind in a fighting circle of beats. But that’s the thrill.

Though there is barely anything resembling a melody on the album (except for maybe ‘My Yellow Ferrari’ which sounds like looking at a bazaar in rewind), its incredible nuance is achieved through the kaleidoscopic textures and patterns of the drum beats. The sounds often rattle and chatter before eating themselves up, chewing them violently and swallowing them before spitting them out again. It is an uneasy listen and incredibly hard to decipher to the average listener but so compelling in its complexity. For all of its immense obscurity, you have to give the band props because for something quite cerebral it manages to be quite primal. It taps into something ineffably instinctual within you, like your fight or flight mechanism, as the feeling of being thrown in the deep end and not knowing what’s coming compound your anxiety.

Overall, if the preceding passage hasn’t alluded to it enough, ‘No Fiction Now!’ is not for everyone. It’s barely even for hardcore fans of contemporary music. It’s not pleasant, immediate, catchy, digestible or even just “clever enough” – the characteristics of a lot of music we perceive as good nowadays. Most people will write this off as some pretentious, anti-music, post-modernist rubbish that could soundtrack a contemporary dance art installation in a Brooklyn warehouse, but this is not music that is designed to simply consume and enjoy. In fact, it’s hard to imagine at what time of the day or what activities you’d be doing whilst listening to this. Whatever it is though, it seeks to challenge a listener’s normal interpretations of what music is and how it should sound. And if you have any sort of interest to test those boundaries within yourself, then ‘No Fiction Now!’ could dispel your innermost truths if given the chance.