Indignant Senility is Pat Maherr from Portland Oregon, he has many fingers in many pies (from hip-hop to lo fi noise projects), but Plays Wagner is his first for Type. The idea here is that he's picked up old Wagner records and turned them into drone/ambient material, presumably through some technique akin to Philip Jeck's turntablism or Murcof's method of taking composers and digitally altering them, though there is a decidedly analog aesthetic running throughout this album. It's supposedly been mastered from tape to vinyl by Dubplates and Mastering.So this is a guy who uses Wagner as his source material and makes haunting subterranean tracks that ripple and distort, pulled this way and that until the source is unrecognisable - until, that is, a flash of the old Nazi fart's over-blown dramatic material shows through in a melody or mid-string movement before drifting away into the haze. I have problems with this release that I didn't think I would actually have problems with. I get the sense whilst listening to it that 'anybody could've done this!'. Now this is something I roll my eyes at when someone says because: well yeah, maybe in a practical sense, but no-one else HAS done this, have they? It might seem easy or obvious, but not easy or obvious enough for someone else to've come up with this exact thing before, and there's probably a lot more technique involved than you're assuming. What makes me think this way, though, is that it is actually quite bland. Which is another thing I usually shrug and shake my head at when someone says about ambient/drone, because it's all about the long-game and the mood, with tiny details becoming major details in their context. Of COURSE it's boring, but it's about putting yourself beyond such things as 'boring'. To which people generally reply 'right, you're clearly a pretentious clown, see ya later' (obviously I don't say these things to people and they don't reply, I know no-one who would actually want to talk about this stuff). There are ghostly 'hauntalogical' aspects here, and Maherr seems to favour the horrific over the mournful which perhaps puts him in a more interesting light if you have anything invested in that scene (I don't).So what am I saying? I'm saying this album is something on paper which would really capture my interest, but in the reality doesn't actually do anything for me. Or does it? I remember a play-through where I got to the hour mark (it's a CD-filling 80 minutes front-to-back) and started to see orange-brown cascades of paint, flecks of light flicking on and off, and a grey loam being split with a spade, clay-like clods of earth appearing and with them captured moments of an orchestra drowned yet undead at the bottom of a modest loch, or perhaps of gentleman in 1920s formal clothing, except they've been burnt alive, charred bones and cooked flesh and crawling with maggots. So what does THAT mean? Is it that this album is actually succeeding? Dramatic, stirring, pompous classical music has been turned into a drab boring emulsion, except when the source material fights it's way to the surface, and then I see discolouration and 'grey loam', stars sparking on and off, terrible things that I wish I hadn't seen. Is the boredom counter-weighted by the 'tiny details becoming major details'? And what of having to wait 60 minutes before all this starts to happen? For all that this is my review, and that I've listened to this album many times, I can't tell. Is that the mark, perhaps, of something truly succeeding, truly achieving something, the fact that I can't tell? Or is this a pretend version of something interesting, an album released on Type with an interesting concept? I certainly WANT it to be worth my time. Nothing is definite here.If it seems like I'm dodging what the things actually physically sounds like, that's because it's hard to describe. You fall back on metaphors and similes, ghoulish scenes, synesthesia and such because this goes beyond where normal music crit vocabulary goes, personally I'm still struggling to create a new lexicon for ambient/drone/out there/weird music. So here's a video of Indignant Senility, and I'll just add the caveat that for me there's less detail and tunnels in the sound on the record than there is in this live performance.