Münchausen Syndrome is the terrible psychiatric condition perhaps more commonly referred to as being a hypochondriac—feigning sickness in order to draw attention and sympathy towards oneself. It's a tricky thing to call yourself that being a musician, especially if you're making emotionally charged music, so let me get this right out of the way—There is no way Byron Chance (the man behind this puzzling nomenclature) is faking it. This music is simply written, recorded, produced, and it comes out the same way it probably went into the tape machine: very real and very honest. You can hear it right away with opener "Sponge," which dives directly into its beautiful melody with no introduction; a haunting tune that arrives immediately, glides along a cascading chord progression and gently tugs at your tear ducts. It's telling that this is the first thing you'll notice about Münchausen—the songwriting, the melodies. Not his voice, skill, the production value, who it reminds you of, or even the style. Those things all come later... hints of Guided by Voices' fragile melodicism, vintage post-rock's lightening strikes of guitar, and the strums of delicate folksters can all be picked out of Münchausen's sound. But first, it is absolutely his music, and no one else's.
As you might have guessed, the title "Null + Void" is neither apt nor appropriate here either. Chance fills his recordings with a lot of substance despite using a fairly spare mix of instruments and vocals. Guitars (after pedals have been appropriately set and stomped upon—something you can actually hear in the recordings) pack a girthy grind to them, distortions welling up and washing out into tremulous (if also humbling) storms of harmonic noise. Thunderous crashes of feedback slice through with unsettling blasts and vocals, though sunk deep in an ocean of lyric-obfuscating reverb, ring through with a kind of iridescent sheen. Overall a basic mix of basic instruments and singing, basically effected, but excellently (perhaps even complexly) executed to produce drone-like soundscapes while retaining the skeletal makings of pop and folk songs.
So aside from having an ill-fitting name, an even more oddly titled debut, and something of an outlier for its ultimate track ("Henry Rollins"—not a bad tune by any means, just an actual rock-feel with a more chiseled verse/chorus structure to it) the only other problem I see here is the length: This thing is under ten minutes long. Sounds to me like this "faker" with zeroed out, empty songs has a lot more honesty and weight to share than he may be willing to admit.
Crawf
Audio stream of "Sponge"::
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<3 u Crawfy.