OOIOO
Gamel
Reviewed by: Ari Roth
OOIOO’s latest record, as its title suggests, is essentially a modern Gamelan album, derived from the tuned percussion and interlocking patterns of traditional Indonesian music, but incorporating burnt out, fuzzy psychedelia, wonky electronics, and a heavy dose of zany humor. This progressive, omnivorous, transcontinental approach to traditional music finds particular resonance with the American band Sun City Girls, as well as leader Yoshimi P-We’s better-known band, the Japanese surrealist noise group Boredoms.
The songs here foreground the swirling, dizzying repetition common to both Gamelan and the most out-there psychedelic rock, and the results are sublime. It’s hard to think about the record in terms of discrete songs, and the album feels more like a series of movements than a collection of songs proper, lacking the attendant hooks, choruses, and familiar structures. In their place, the album zips rapidly from sound to sound, flitting between soft passages that emphasize the delicate timbre of the Gamelan gongs, and hallucinatory jams full of pounding batteries of percussion, distorted, intertwining guitars, and looping bass lines. At other times, trumpets, voices and synthesizers join the fray, contributing noisy textures or countermelodies to the polyphonic stew. It’s an exhilarating and often exhausting listen, and its nearly hour-long runtime is certainly challenging, though always exciting and engaging.
Gamelan has always had a complicated relationship with “outsiders,” and in the second half of the 20th century it was often consumed as historically-bound traditional music as part of the “world music” craze. Like Sun City Girls, OOIOO refuse to adhere to these notions of purity and traditional fidelity in dealing with Gamelan, a characteristic that may leave them open to accusations of appropriation, but also may hold the key to their success. In opposition to the stuffy, static attitude that many non-Indonesian musicians have towards the music, OOIOO’s music on Gamel is proudly hybrid and experimental, both honoring a traditional style and taking it somewhere new and delightfully unexpected.
Rating: 
