Hafler Trio:
If Take, Then Take--Tricks, Half Tricks, and Real Phenomena LP

Unanswered questions, unasked-for responses, stimulus and response exercises conducted and presented for the benefit of a select few. Hafler Trio has always asked more of the listener than many sound artists do, with questions and ideas that provoke and, like an open invitation, await response from those who are willing to tackle, often at length, the ideas presented. Furthering the pleasures / complications, a trapezoidal-shaped booklet with additional points of query is part of the packaging so that those who wish additional illuminations, provocations, questions, and--when the light is right--answers, may add greater tricks to their own personal repetoire of knowledge. Please note: in this instance, knowledge may be considered fact, fiction, or entirely up for debate. This record is limited to 400 copies and each is hand signed by the artist.
This is the first Hafler Trio LP in ten years.
Revelation on one hand, obfuscation on the other--this is the art of The Hafler Trio, whose solo technician Andrew McKenzie presents metaphysical research as sound constructions and interrelated written texts. Aesthetically speaking, McKenzie has long demonstrated a masterful control over his enigmatic sounds that flutter and drone as if divined from electricity singing to itself. Through the self-professed tricks, half-tricks and real phenomenon of If Take, Then Take, he engineers grandiose gestures of minimalism with a sensibility closer to his earlier work (eg An Utterance Of The Supreme Ventriloquist), and marked by sudden stops and hammered claps that change the musical direction. In addition to the diffuse mirage of McKenzie's compositions, his texts beseech the audience to seek knowledge of the self by deconstructing the biological, spiritual and technological institutions that have infected mankind. Within this oblique exegesis, McKenzie conveys a frustration that his ideals may not be getting through, even though his tech-gnostic sleights of hand are intended as conundrums. Not all of us may be wise enough to sit in the court of the magician, but at least he lets us hear how magnificent his chorus is.--The Wire
With a lot of our reviews we don't mention the cover of the product. Usually because we think it's the music that we should care about, but here is an exception: this new LP by The Hafler Trio is by far the best dressed item of the week. A mirrored image in full color with extra black over black printing and a trapezoidal booklet, with more images and text. Text in the usual Hafler Trio fashion, texts that elude me most of the time, to be honest. You read a few lines, put the booklet aside and think about what you read. In the meantime you can play the music. What is noteworthy here is that each side apparently has more musical pieces, but that's just (another) illusion - like so many things with The Hafler Trio. Each side runs like one track, even when the eye notes more pieces per side. Nothing is what is seems to be. The Hafler Trio raises questions and never gives answers, and even if it would do, you still wouldn't understand it. The music is a continuation of the drone music that The Hafler Trio have been exploring ever since their return to the music, late 2002. The b-side is a bit similar to the work executed with Autechre on their second collaboration: soft drones that end abruptly a few times in the beginning, and then there is a click sound. After that things start again. Overall it seems to be fading out at a very slow speed. As before and as to come, The Hafler Trio raises questions as-well as eyebrows, but they do this with the great sense of esthetic. As a true devotee no objections here. My favorite of this week.--Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
This LP--the first full-length h3o LP for ten years, if we're to believe the Crippled Intellect website­-is subtitled "Tricks, Half-Tricks and Real Phenomena",which is a rather apt description of the world of Andrew Mckenzie. To paraphrase Frans de Waard, The Hafler Trio asks questions and never answers them, and even if it did, you wouldn't understand. If there's one word to describe McKenzie's oeuvre (which shows no sign of abating--quite the contrary--despite his recently publicized health problems), it's inscrutable. Both the music, an austere, even chilly, assemblage of drones whose origins are as difficult to fathom as the architectural bigger picture they fit into, and the texts that invariably accompany it, with their strange, slightly surreal juxtaposition of grammatical abstruseness and tired cliché. To a certain extent, as David Cotner noted in these pages recently, there's something almost pointless about reviewing a Hafler Trio album in the first place. It's tempting merely to string together some quotes fromMcKenzie's liners that may (or may not) shed some light on a music that's as hard to describe as it is difficult not to admire. There's something heroically stubborn about devoting one's life to the production of beautifully packaged works of art (like this one, which comes in a signed edition of 400 with a 16-page trapezoidal booklet) that will probably have sold out and disappeared into lovingly cared-for private collections by the time you readthis. As I've managed to miss out on a number of highly acclaimed Hafler Trio releases since the last one that came my way (2003's The Moment When We Blow The Flour From Our Tongues on Crouton), I'm not in a position to say with certainty exactly where If Take, Then Take fits into the h3o canon. Nor am I able to tell just from listening how the continuous spans of music on each side of the LP divide into, respectively, six and four tracks. What's in no doubt though is that it's another rare and elusive dispatch from a singularly original figure in today's new music. Hope you can find a copy.-­Dan Warburton, paristransatlantic.com