April 05, 2004
OOIOO | Kila Kila Kila |Thrill Jockey | Japan
buy it
There's a paradox I've noticed in writing about new music--the more singular an artist's vision is, the longer the list of names and styles to which you're tempted to compare them. Yoshimi Yokota (a.k.a. Yoshimi P-we a.k.a. Yoshimi (who) Battles the Pink Robots a.k.a. the drummer of the Boredoms) calls this paradox to mind with her band OOIOO. Their new album Kila Kila Kila is a forest of beautiful and ever-evolving creatures. Each song carries the genes of a thousand musical ancestors but expresses them in the most unexpected mutations--birds open gills in midair and plunge into the deep, elk grow rattles on their antlers and the butterflies have giant stingers.
Boredoms-style trance can push the pedal point to the metal, rocking a single chord for minutes on end. On "ene soda" Yoshimi digs into the trance of the elders, singing a simple pentatonic melody over soundscape of bells, chimes, wood xylophone and rain stick that's punctuated by intermittent single-note explosions of rock. It's to authentic "primative" music what early Can is to authentic James Brown--that is to say, a naively accomplished mutation.
The next track, "Sezuku Ring Neng" picks up where the previous one left off, using the same instruments and call-and-response vocals that conjure an ancient forest ceremony. If Doctor John's L.S.D. experiments had been in Bali rather than Congo Square, it might have sounded something like this, but things are just getting started. A single-note electric guitar cascade begins and the song shapeshifts around it into a throbbing rock jam before morphing again into something like acid jazz and then hitting a Stereolab stride in the 10th minute stretch.
The fifteen-minute "Aster" brings to mind Miss Murgatroid & Petra Hayden's recent work, switches to a beautiful choral piece, then enters the gorgeous realm of Mishio Ogawa before becoming a deconstructed hippie funk jam, a hyperactive pointilist improv and finally a beautiful choral piece again.
I could continue in this vein, but it's exhausting and counterproductive to tease out the influences from such a strange, organic and soulful album--I feel like I'm dissecting a jackalope and telling you what it ate instead of watching it hop through the forest. So no more of this. Buy this CD... and send the forest spirits and mutant creatures my love.
Posted by Mack Hagood at April 5, 2004 05:37 PM