MOGWAI

On the night of Friday 13th February 2015, I experienced something genuinely amazing and groundbreaking. A truly unique musical experience, and an introduction to a band I’ve found it hard to get out of my head ever since. The venue was the Volkswagen Arena, organized by Pozitif Live, and the band was the inimitable Mogwai.

Mogwai are a truly unique and exceptional musical group. Hailing from Glasgow, they are the masters of cosmic post-rock whose simple melodies somehow develop and grow into something far more complex and high quality. Their music, sophisticated and intellectual, nevertheless brings about a calming influence on me, and the thousands of others who flock to see them wherever they play. 

I have never found another musical group who come close to replicating or imitating their style. Mogwai are one of the few groups in the world whose performances (I believe) have a transcendent effect, genuinely connecting with the soul, and allowing it to rise up. Listening to their music takes me on a journey of the mind where I question everything, moving beyond the humdrum day-to-day cares and looking at the world differently. I find I can talk about things with fewer words, and I find a sort of inner peace that makes me look for different priorities in my life, and care less about things like unplanned urbanization, traffic jams, crowds, deadlines etc.

When I first saw Mogwai live, they had just released their EP Music Industry 3, Fitness Industry 1. Since then, although their guitarist John Cummings left the band in order to pursue his own projects, Mogwai have continued to perform and record. Their latest album, Every Country’s Sun, was released at the end of 2017, and they’ve toured extensively ever since. One of the most interesting things about Mogwai is the way they’ve moved between genres and played around with musical concepts, particularly with their work on film soundtracks. They composed the score to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and the music there was fundamental to the beauty of the film. They have specifically written music for a huge number of films and documentaries, and their remarkable, unforgettable sound creates the perfect background for drama and gritty realism alike.

This is their song Teenage Exorcists, a hauntingly beautiful piece and one of my favourites.