Whooa! It’s a fucking good band – I said during the listening to the recordings, despite I am not a big fan of math rock. And finally it turned up that two bands’ songs was mixed up in my player, the Ukrainian Gravitsapa, and the Italian Astolfo Sulla Luna (Astolfo on the Moon).

Astolfo plays quantum mechanic rock which is based on uncertainty principle under strong influence of literature. „Obnoxious, antiseptic, mathematician, restless, unreal, evil, tender.” Synthesize the reality and then spit it out with delay distortions. Anyway „Astolfo hates you. But basically, it is hated by everyone…” And he has a horn, so loud that his all enemies to flee in terror when it sounds.

Astolfo is one of the 12 paladins of Charlemagne, went to the Moon on Elijah’s chariot of fire to search his friend Orlando’s wit. Because on the Moon „is wonderfully stored / Whatever on our earth below we lose. / Collected there are all things whatsoe’er, / Lost through time, chance, or our own folly, here.” And there Astolfo of course found Orlando’s wit in a bottle – by poem of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533).

But chariot of fire does not run too often, so if we want to travel to the Moon because for example do not find our mental balance, we maybe can use a Pepelats interplanetary spacecraft. And it has an important component which allows intergalactic travel: Gravitsapa. From which this Ukrainian math rock band has got his name.

„Musicians do not expect to find understanding on Earth, so they are trying to gain spiritual experience and create music as divinities for new audiences of spiritual connoisseurs of inadequate.” They are constantly compared with King Crimson, which band was unknown for them, and mainly inspired by film directors: by sincerity of Jodorowsky (Chilean scholar in comparative religion, playwright, director, producer, composer, actor, mime, comic book writer, tarot reader, historian and psychotherapist), craziness of Lynch, atmospheric of Sokurov (Russian), conceptuality of Yevgeny Yufit (necrorealist Russian) and the monotony of Hungarian Béla Tarr. And Pepelats comes from a Soviet sci-fi black comedy Kin-Dza-Dza!

When I listened to them two bands came to my mind: the  proto math rock hardcore jazz Victim’s Family, and the Dutch jazz punk band Morzelpronk.

Astolfo Sulla Luna – Ψ² CD + digital album. (Vinyl version from the band) &

Gravitsapa – Radio Free Vulgata digital album (It contains two EPs from 2013)

released by Australian label TENZENMEN