Red Wine And Sugar is the duo of Melbournians Mark Groves and Samaan Fieck, a melding of (as the promo blurb accurately states) “drily delivered text and concrète sound”, found across a small collection of mostly locally released discography entries which have matched Mark’s texts with experimental conjurations seemingly derived from slowed and abused tapes and related media. ‘Donkeys Are Led By Donkeys’ is the duo touching base during 2020’s covid-19 city lockdown, connection as a duo attained through societal and musical disconnect and the sound components then delivered to Altar Of Flies soundsmith Mattias Gustafsson for a reworking on the record’s B side.
The untampered recording of “Donkeys Are Led By Donkeys” starts sparsely, words hanging from silent hooks before being bolstered with a grab-bag of left-field sound. A free jazz sensibility courses through the piece’s sonic choices as discordant jabs, raw guitar clumps, an almost sleazy percussive pulse and a wheezing hum are all shaped through the piece’s opening few minutes, before hitting a cloud of darker murmur which is allowed to close the piece out. While the duo have never been confined in their sound inputs, “Donkeys Are Led By Donkeys” seems more openly musical in its backing, thieving what could easily be The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation off-cuts to stitch together an experimental home bar version of early morning jazz ambience for Mark’s words to hang off in lament.
The unflinching and unhurried vocal delivery – a constant to Red Wine And Sugar’s discography – echoes the isolationism of the cover, fragments of bubbled-up dysphoria and covid lockdown reportage growing increasingly abstractified with a Burroughs-ian cut-up sensibility to its prose, a sensibility finding reflection in the lyrics’ visual treatment on the front cover. Mark is a careful and evocative lyricist and “Donkeys Are Led By Donkeys” is another layered text which has both superficial resonance and deeper intrigue.
Mattias Gustafsson’s remix/reimagining of the track on the B side mistreats grainy cassette drone with mangled tape hiccups, hiding a distant depth of sound and collection of junk ephemera in its haze which has more than a hint of Nurse With Wound’s murky drone depths. That opening resonance is swept aside by the spoken word returning, a concise staccato to the underpinning sounds maintaining a busy trajectory but still imprinting space around the concrete sounds. The urgency which builds through the original track is gone although its sonic remnants remain differently accented and ordered, with muffled junk caterwaul, Leone-adjacent guitar punctuations, close-microphoned crumpling and disquiet cable hum all finding an irregular cycle at Mattias’ hands. The spoken word too is subject to degradation, irregular effects and mangled repetitions adding uncharacteristic tone to the project’s usual indifference.
The generation of space within the remix, its opening celebration of error and shadow, and its choices of fragments to limpingly repeat, make the treatment a welcome and distinctly different addition to the original piece, various qualities emphasised and abandoned in addition to the introduced sensibility of the opening. Red Wine And Sugar has always been an intriguing and unique project and ‘Donkeys Led By A Donkey’ furthers that of its own accord, but accented by Mattias Gustafsson’s characteristic imprint.
