(The Wire)Methe is a Nebraska musician whose work I know vaguely from collaborations with Simon Joyner and a lo-fi solo LP on Grapefruit. Fellow Cornhusker Siebe is a cellist who has worked with both Methe and Joyner (among others). The music here consists of two sidelong meditations on the theme music for UK TV’s Brideshead Revisited. Using cello, violin, loops and electronics, the pair run through a range of approaches to the music, most of them fairly subtle in their detournment of the theme’s short phrases. Nice stuff, although I kept thinking the quiet part at the ends of the first side was another more avant take on the music I just needed to PLAY LOUDER. Pretty sure it was not. - Byron Coley
(Chattanooga Pulse)Countless philosophers have contemplated time and memory for millennia, but one notable contemporary covers those topics in an extraordinarily pithy manner, with equal parts truth and absurdity. This writer is talking, of course, about the comedian Steven Wright, who has quipped such gems as “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” and “A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.” One of Wright’s jokes in particular comes to mind when absorbing the album Revisited, Revisited, Revisited by the Omaha, Neb. duo of L. Eugene Methe and Megan Siebe: “Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time; I think I’ve forgotten this before.” The new album, available on cassette from the Public Eyesore offshoot, Eh? Records, features variations of the stately, majestic theme for the 1981 British television mini-series Brideshead Revisited composed by Geoffrey Burgon. Revisited, Revisited, Revisited was intended to also pay tribute to the show’s source material, Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, by both breaking down and blurring time and structure, as the protagonist’s memories sculpt the story’s nonlinear path. When listening to the album, it’s difficult to gauge how much time has passed without a stopwatch. Main melodic motifs appear and reappear through Siebe’s cello parts, almost oppressive in their repetition; however, those themes hardly seem like markers or milestones, and the entire affair feels amorphous. Methe handles the sonic manipulation side of things with measured electronic treatments and echo processing through cassette loops, and there’s occasional sound warping through bent notes or envelope effects, making tones scamper cyclically into various frequency ranges. At one point, the faint sounds of a sampled classical record can be heard, and it wouldn’t be off-base to lump this album in the worlds of minimalism and ambient music. Some of the most compelling moments on Revisited, Revisited, Revisited reveal themselves through careful delay effects. Sometimes the echoing provides an urgent pace, and at other times, it allows the main theme to interact with itself, like a round (think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with staggered beginnings for the vocal parts), perhaps like a time traveler having a conversation with its younger self. Oddly, while the primary melody is hammered into the listener’s head, everything that surrounds it remains a curious, fuzzy memory. - Ernie Paik
(Cassette Gods) I never watched “Brideshead Revisited,” the 1981 British teledrama on ITV that starred a pre-“Dungeons and Dragons” Jeremy Irons, but if it’s anything like it seems from cursory research, the “Downton Abbey” contingent is sure to find it readily appealing. Here, on “Revisited, Revisited, Revisited,” the show’s theme, composed by Geoffery Burgon, is repurposed by artists L. Eugene Methe and Megan Siebe. Utilizing cello, violin, cassette loops, and electronics, the duo teases out the originals chamber vibe into an echo of otherworldly sound, a historical document harking back to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain with remarkable ease. Perhaps it’s not too disingenuous to suggest that Methe and Siebe take a page from Leyland Kirby’s Caretaker manual, the ghostly-melancholia-of-nostalgia vibe cycled through effects. But hey, if it works, it works, and it certainly works. I’m pretty much transported exactly to a manor in the English countryside where I can lounge by trees with teddy bears or lounge by fountains with teddy bears or lounge in gondolas with teddy bears or rip around in this thing all day. The sounds bleed through time, from the past to the present, all on cassette tape like the prophecies foretold. These extended meditations on the theme are a delight to zone out to on a clear spring day, by fountains, trees, or streams. - Ryan Masteller
(Vital Weekly) The album by Eugene Methe and Megan Siebe is something totally different. We hear Siebe playing cello and violin. Methe plays loops(cassette) and electronics. They present a reworking of the main theme of British TV-drama ´Brideshead Revisited´, that was composed by Geoffrey Burgon. They create a dreamy echoing world that reminded me of the work by The Caretaker, and even more so of Gavin Bryars ´The Sinking of the Titanic´. A short phrase of the main theme is repeated and repeated, with constantly slightly changing elements. The music has a hypnotic effect, almost like waves of water rolling onto the beach. Deeper and deeper we sink into another world. Well done! - Dolf Mulder
