City Dragon is Max Kaario, who is part of different bands such as Altersgruppe, Teenage God, ski attic etc. Canadian, he lives in Paris since a big ten years where he organizes concerts such as
cmptrmthmthcs in bars that are always changing and kebabs sometimes.
The first time I saw Max play with City Dragon was at Pauline Perplexe, an artist place in Arcueil where his friends have their studios. He was singing and improvising with a drum toy, and dancing spinning right round a bit like Calvin Johnston. The disc he proposes here has been recorded on tapes and is composed of 31 short tracks which flow one after another in a radical way, like musical and poetical cut-ups. The format of these tracks reminds me of the ones of Split or even
Urinals and one wrote about Urinals that their lyrics were like punk haikus. I do not know who wrote this. Well, it is not really the same here, it is more about loops and cuttings. Music seems to be arranged like cinematographic sequences where images appear and disappear on the film very shortly, on the magnetic band here to be precise. It barely gives you the time to catch a glimpse of a fragmented story and then vanishes and that’s fine. The disc is made out of many noises sometimes saturated, drum machines, synths and pedals meet with recorded sounds of a dog barking, sound of toys, and absurd nursery rhymes one can invent everyday and which tend to join other orphan pop songs. It’s tender, and onirical as well as ironical at the same time and creaky
like old computer’s sounds or circus like theme in a horror movie. City Dragon also crosses in his disc the furrows of the music of Mayo Thompson with Corky’s Debt to his father, Beat Happening,
Alex Zhang Hungtai, some might say Daniel Johnston, the Holy Modal Rounders or maybe a wobbly Steve Reich, and many others but it is never exactly that. The dragon roams the city slightly, elusive. As well as the loops he uses which seem to be sabotaged, lopsided and stretched
out to something else before being clearly-cut in their dreamy visions. One could imagine that the record would start spinning and oscillating on the turntable, then fly away like a dragon, you’ve got to listen to it before it happens.
- ¨Pauline Roches