| CD REVIEW Master Musicians Of Bukkake |
 |
|
Band: Master Musicians Of Bukkake I always look out with a certain apprehension…nay, anticipation…to any new Conspiracy releases, because you can be sure in advance that what you get is of the mind-enhancing, spirit-broadening, musically versatile kind! Things ain’t any different with this, Master Musicians Of Bukkake’s second full-length album! Weird bandname to start with…as “bukkake” stands for a particularly heinous type of Japanese porn flicks! But actually the “bukkake” part of their name is meant to be a big finger up to the music business, and no indication of the band members’ sexual preferences! On the other side the bandname this collection of musicians from the Seattle scene took for themselves doés refer to India’s Master Musicians Of Joujouka, at least musically…because a lot of the music MMOB plays has Indian undertones to it! A first album titled The Visible Sign Of The Invisible Order (recorded at keyboardist/ producer extraordinare Randall Dunn’s own Aleph Studios) was released on Sun City Girls’ member Alan Bishop’s Abduction Records in 2005, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because musically SCG and MMOB are, according to the biography (which I still need to check out personally to see to what degree that statement holds), musicaly connected. From that bio: “…back in their first incarnation with guitarist John Schuller, MMOB had a rep for erratic, debauched behaviour and a scattershot, improvisational approach to creativity, using their minds and bodies as chemistry experiments while filtering ritualistic Asian and African musics through an “everything goes as long as it’s mind-warping” mindset. Gamelan, Tibetan monk chants, Moroccan Trance Rock, and other exotic strains of Psychedia all became Bukkake-fied, with alternately sublime and grotesque results…”. Schuller then left, and the band went on a hiatus! Eventually, Milky (electric and slide guitar, indian strings, flute, lapsteel) and Don McGreevy (drums, gamelan, electric 12-string guitar, bass, mellotron) of Earth, Randal Dunn (analog synths, mellotron, electric saz, and tampura drones), James Davis (bass, acoustic guitar), and Brad Mowen (of Burning Witch; vocals, gamelan) enticed Bill Horist (Ghidra; electric & acoustic guitar, analog “eagles”) and Dave Abramson (the Diminished Men; drums, gamelan) into joining them and start the MMOB up again. As a (first) result, we now get this great 7-track, 40-minute album…and there really is no good way to deescribe what you might hear when playing the album, except give you a shorrt description song-by-song! Imagine firstly, that the first 4 tracks are linked together with overlapping passages. The album opens with “Bardo Chikkhai” and a background of open-air conversations, apparently recorded on some African street, and then a bunch of Tibetan monks start their two-tone drone (one in front with a really deep tone, on a slow drone; the other on a higher tone, halfway in the background, but with a faster repetitive drone!) accompanied with some sparce gamelan finger cimbals. Towards the beginning of track two (“A Mist Of Illnesses”), you’ve get some bells, and suddenly the gamelan is being played at a higher pace (still with the finger cimbals in the back)…the high drone dies out, a synth weirdness is added, and for a short time even the deep drone stops, actual drumming comes in, and the deep drone vocals return, as do the high ones, but somewhat sparcer now. In the latter part of the song…I guess it’s the electric saz entering there…and to “end” the track you get some “choral” keyboards (you know, keyboards sounding like as if there’s a choir) to boot! With that saz and keyboards (now turned to “orchestral”) still in the fore, the first electric guitar note starts at the first second of “In The Lightness Of Sonaran”, actually a guitar solo with the guitarists playing like as if they are in fact two sitar player stoned out of their skulls on sedatives. Funny that the first real guitar notes of the ensuing (or overlapped, rather) “People Of The Drifting Houses” are on the one side acoustic and on the other…sitar! A wacky song with apparently invented lyrics which have a shamanistic feel, standing with one foot in the Indian world, with the other in that of the Muslim chanters; Gee, forgot to mention, Alan Bishop is a vocal guest here. Together with Bowen he succeeds in making an attractive drone (there’s even moments when you would thing there’s a small mass of people joining in in the background), and it’s only because the electric guitar starts to grow in a crescendo freak-out that one is capable to move away somewhat from its hypnotic feel! “Shiwm Prism/ Adamantios” is the second song on the album to start from scratch, and does that with a slow stoner guitar and keyboards. When the finger cimbals fall in, the guitar steps into a somewhat repetitive ‘70’s Psychedlia styled “drone”, which enhances the somewhat native American Indian feel of the vocals that then set in. Seemlessly, the songs then turns to a Moroccan Rock instrumental bit, courtesy of guest violinist Timbo Harris (of Secret Chief 3) ‘s contribution. After a while the Moroccan bit dies out, the vocals return as do the gamelan cimbals, and the guitar(?) and keyboard start a freaky “improvisational” exit. What follows next is the beautiful acoustic two-guitar-plus-flute instrumental “Cascade Cathedral”, at the end of which some orchestral/ atmospheric keyboards ensure an overlap to lengthy (over 9 minutes) album closer “Eaglewolf”, which seems to opens with some gun shots at dawn (a rooster giving sign of life in the background) on a background of etherical electric guitar (sustain) and keyboards. Then an acoustic guitar starts a “Hare Krishna”-like repetitive riff, and three minutes into the song a “choir” in which the female is the dominant voice actually starts a drone with what seem to be the words “Hare Yaya” (repeating this over and over again to hypnotic effect). About six minutes into the song, some (Native American) Indian starts a whale of his own on top (well, actually in the background), and the synths start laying some things on top. In spite of the cultural “differences”, the vocals go wonderfully together. One minute before ending, the music and singings start to subdue and fade away, the sounds of waves growing to the for more and more…and it’s on that “touch of nature” that the album, and the listening session, ends. Unless, like me, you can’t get enough of it all, and re-start the CD all over again even before the last bit of silence is died out! I’ve found no Myspace for these guys, nor an own website, but you can listen to a couple of samples at conspiracyrecords.com. Seen the trouble I took to review this thing track-by-track, I guess you’ve gathered that I really lóve this, eh? Well, it sure is my absolute top album of this year so far (at this moment, of course)! Hence the top rating, too! 100/100 Tony. |