Yishai Sweartz and Mona Mur – Clouds Of War
Yishai Sweartz and Mona Mur – Clouds Of War
Soleilmoon Recordings
Release Date: 20/06/2024
Running Time: 39:30
Review by Dark Juan
10/10
Don’t ever get a French Bulldog, they are pint-sized emotional dictators that have an unerring ability to push you to the very, bleeding edge of sanity and then when you are about to embark on a killing spree that makes fucking Jeffrey Dahmer seem like a nice, well-adjusted young gentleman, will revert to an appalling level of cuteness that is fucking irresistible and melts the heart. And they keep doing it. It’s no wonder that Dark Juan’s psyche is a fractured, wounded thing. The young gentleman of the household, Mossy Boggart Rowan Grimshaw Cravensworth IV has been driving your good correspondent insane this afternoon as I try to create a supremely crafted, erudite record review for your delectation. Not content with his nose already being out of joint because Mrs Dark Juan left the house without him to go swimming, he has gone full Don Quioxte and is barking and charging at his own fucking shadow.
He’s run into the cupboard door three times. Also, the stench from his arse is fucking ridiculous. Mrs Dark Juan has now christened him Gassius Clay. I laughed. In return I told her the following joke:
How do you castrate a man from Barnsley?
Punch his sister in the jaw.
She didn’t laugh. It was worse, she gave me that pitying look (male spouses will know the one I mean) and shook her head on the way out. Absolutely devastated, friends. Absolutely devastated.
Anyway, I should be doing degree work for my job right now, but I really can’t be arsed with it because waffling about the Prevent Duty as part of the CONTEST strategy is tedious as fuck, man. Hence, I have once more called into operation the eminent Platter of Splatter™ and this time have elected for an unusual record, a collaboration between Yishai Sweartz of Tel Aviv’s Tomorrow’s Rain and Berlin’s cult singer-composer Mona Mur, entitled “Clouds of War” and being based upon the life and diary of Yishai Sweartz’s grandfather, WW2 Partisan Moshe Szniecki, this project intertwines evocative spoken word and captivating experimental arrangements.
Imagine, if you please, the rampant eclecticism and the cut-glass spoken word and poetry of The Chronicle Of Manimal And Samara’s Daphne Ang, that band’s absolute refusal to comply with any know genre norms and the beating, but icy-cold mechanical heart of the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten and Kraftwerk, and the Gothic timbres and experimentalism of Xmal Deutschland (indeed, Anja Huwe’s voice enhances some of the music on this unique record) and the Alternative Rock of The Flaming Lips all mixed together and spat out of the end of a very strange machine composed of bone pistons and inchoate screaming and you’ll have a rough idea of what I am trying to describe, musically. It is so much more than that, though.
The music tells the story of Moshe Szniecki, a seventeen-year-old boy from Belarus and his journey from pious boy into partisan fighter, striking Nazis from the forests of his home and his descriptions of death and misery, his escape from a Jewish ghetto, the deaths of his family and his subsequent actions as a partisan. He also details (in ‘Moshe’s Song’) the “Code of The Woods”, and how he developed this in order to survive as a partisan, who were often executed without charge or mercy when captured by Wehrmacht and SS soldiers after horrific tortures.
This, then, is a deeply personal recording for Yishai Sweartz, and it is fucking heartrending in places, almost robotic in others and the spoken word pieces drag at the soul – a dispassionate description of how Moshe’s parents smothered their own baby child to death with a pillow to prevent his giving them away with his cries to the Germans is just… devastating.
The horror. The awful, dreadful horror of the Holocaust and the extermination of Jews, because some fat, impotent little Austrian bastard who couldn’t even get into art college decided they were Untermensch and needed eradicating. Fucking hell. That’s hit Dark Juan right in the guts and I can barely keep from crying. This record bears no relevance about what is happening in Israel at the moment, as unbearable as it is (Dark Juan will take no responsibility for the actions of peoples several thousand miles away from him because Dark Juan is nowhere near well informed enough to have an opinion. Dark Juan also has friends who are Jewish and some who are Muslim, and Arab, and Palestinian and they are ALL GOOD PEOPLE who are not responsible for the work of governments and terrorists / freedom fighters. This is a historical work) – this is from the past. A voice who fought for his own liberty and that of millions of others with his own blood against an efficient, battle-hardened military machine hell-bent on the destruction of his entire race. Imagine the courage it takes to fight back against a much better armed, equipped and trained fighting force consumed by hatred for you simply because of an accident of birth and a demented, failed Austrian art student despising you.
‘By the morning, it started…’ describes the massacre of over six thousand people and details the excitement and trepidation of the excitement of young partisans as they embark on operations of revenge against the Nazis (I use the word Nazi here, because Germans were just as exploited and punished if they didn’t follow the status quo. The Gestapo were everywhere. Hence, there were millions of innocent Germans who weren’t Nazis. But you had to follow otherwise it wasn’t just you going to be executed or going to concentration camps. It was three generations of your family. You try living under such fear and surviving without at least paying lip service to Nazism. You would not be able to manage it). This is followed with ‘Meet Again’, depicting the sorrow of leaving loved ones to go and fight, the fear and the horror and the febrile, fragile resolve of the young person leaving to fight is achingly clear as well as the deep, deep sorrow of the family saying goodbye, knowing that at some point they are likely to be liquidated. It is a final goodbye with none of the bittersweet aspects of closure. It is the kind of goodbye a condemned prisoner might say to their family.
‘Schmerz’ (this means ‘Pain’ in English) is a further example of the horror of saying goodbye, especially as Moshe is the only one of his family that escaped the ghetto and gets into the forest – ‘Blink Of An Eye’ details more about this, describing how at least in the forest there was a chance of survival, as opposed to the certain death in the ghetto. Moshe describes how the partisans were outlaws and in some people’s opinions worse than the Nazis. “They could kill a Jew in the blink of an eye.”
This is followed by a spine-tingling, Alt Electronic version of Rammstein’s ‘Seemann’ entitled ‘Komm In Mein Boot’ split into two parts, whooshing, wave-like electronics giving way to the most robotic, yet curiously alive stabby, pulsing, Kraftwerk-like Synth Rock.
I have had to stop describing everything on this most affecting of records as I am already 1200 words in, and I literally could keep telling you about this extraordinary chronicle of the horrors of asymmetric and guerilla warfare and survival in the grimmest of circumstances forever. It is a blood-soaked, truly horrific and extremely human tale of just how this race of shaved apes with added anxiety can sink in the name of bullshit politics and racial hatred, and the lessons we could all learn in tolerance, and just what fucking courage, and what cost, it takes to rise up and fight back. It is a very intimate insight into how a young man survived the war and just what it cost him to be as brutal as his oppressors.
An incredibly powerful work – Speaking as a critic for a Metal website, musically speaking there is not much for the Metal fan to enjoy, being as the music is primarily soundscapes to aid the imagination when Moshe’s story is being told, but viewed as a whole piece, “Clouds Of War” is a once in a lifetime album. There will be nothing like this ever again, and it is shocking that this record will only ever get a limited audience, because as a historical document and a tribute to a man fighting for his, and his people’s very existence, this work is beyond compare.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Das patentierte Blutspritzer-Bewertungssystem von Dark Juan) awards Yishai Sweartz and Mona Murs 10/10 for a musical endeavour that transcends genre and style and everything and turns into a man speaking to you across time. Be fucking grateful you aren’t a seventeen-year-old Jew fighting for your very existence in unwelcoming Belarusian forests.
TRACKLISTING:
01. By the morning, it started
02. Meet Again feat. Yossi Sassi
03. Clouds of War – Schmerz
04. Blink Of An Eye
05. Komm in mein Boot (Words & Music: Rammstein) – You’ll die at sea (Words: Latinos)
06. Orlowski feat. En Esch
07. Noch bist du da feat. Anja Huwe (Words: Courtesy of Nachlass Rose Ausländer)
08. Animals in a cage
09. Moshe’s Song
10. Not welcome in the forest
11. Mama’s words
12. Piano Outro
13. Hiroshima Intro feat. Takeyama Ritsuko
LINE-UP:
Yishai Sweartz and Mona Mur – Everything between them.
LINKS:
Yishai Sweartz (Tomorrow’s Rain band links)
Mona Mur
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
