We are dancing into the cool bosom of the dark and breathing in the hot exhale of the hush of the night with a measure of exuberance not felt since the dancing plague of 1518. The tempo of this twist into the arms of the eventide is set by the dispensations and prismatic resonances of Mandy, Indiana. They are a band from Manchester, a city that is no stranger to the compulsions of movement. First, as a merchantile destination for the textile trade, then as an industrial mecca that drew people to it in search of bread like bears converging on a run of salmon, only to become the vestigial appendages of the machines they were tasked with operating. A century later, in the free fall of the '80s, people continued to be drawn to the city with the intention of making something of worth from the movement of their bodies. Less through the process of alienated labor, and more through the ecstatic liberation of their limbs and spirits in a rhythmic release. A city-sized asylum of gyrations and effigy of perspiring flesh that sought to save its wards and participants, not just from the alienation of work, but family, the welfare state, and society as a whole. Mandy, Indiana's isn't a continuation of the "Madchester" aesthetic, even if they embody its almost stoic, insurgent demand to propel a pulsing stir in the human form. Sonically, their debut EP ... appeals more to the renegade, art-house gambol of the New York garage revival and "post-punk" scene of the early '00s, melting drizzling lines of industrial techno which permeate proto-theatrical poetics, shot through with electroclash shock treatments that turn staggered rock beats into rampaging Frankenstein's monsters. There is no delineation in Mandy, Indiana's structures between the steady, evocative and carefully cultivated abience of a gallery show and the permanent drive and swarm of activity embodied by a massive DJ set following a roof-blasting rock show at a downtown club. Mandy, Indiana is a concentration of emergent and ephemeral culture collapsed into a single, formidable outburst of exacting sonic synthesis. They set the pace for your transition, from a single lonely vessel of humanity, into one of a thousand interlocking gears that churn the mechanisms of a grand spellbinding binding machine, whose purpose is part ritual, part festival, part protocol, part meditation, and all too human.
