Shogun Kunitoki - Vinonaamakasio
SKU
05-FONAL062
This is quite great and is basically as described below in Pitchfork; a mixture of 1960s-era Terry Riley sound and rock/psych ala Stereolab or even perhaps Dungen. It is a little bit short, but that only means that the band gave you all their best ideas and nothing feels like padding here. Highly recommended; this was my happy discovery of the month.
"...each track feels as if it could continue to infinity without losing steam ... There's the lonesome joy of Ulrich Schnauss with more foreward tilted drumming, less crashing/rumbling/tumbling of the electro realm. Imagine Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air informed by Stereolab. On each track, the music maintains its forward trajectory, moving and expanding even during its most minimalist echoes."-Pitchfork (7.8)
"This is the second full-length release by Shogun Kunitoki, an instrumental quartet based in Helsinki, Finland. With Vinonaamakasio, Shogun Kunitoki expand the boundaries of their self-created sonic universe with a wider array of sounds and rhythms. Where their debut, Tasankokaiku (Fonal, 2005), squeezed cosmic dust into fiery balls of molten lava with gravitational push and pull and followed the planets whirring through the void on looping trajectories, Vinonaamakasio zooms in to explore the surface of newfound heavenly bodies, outlines the jagged shapes of exploding volcanoes, rolls with the moonlit waves through the cracks of sleeping, phosphorescent coral reefs, and marches in step with the six-legged insect armies making their trails through the steaming jungle. Every atom of this newborn planet of sound vibrates, synchronous to the seething psychedelic stew that throbs under the surface and burns your feet if you let them stop moving. The group's first album came out of nowhere, and established the previously-unknown band as one of the most original instrumental groups to have emerged after the post-rock boom. Tasankokaiku's psychedelic mix of minimalist form and maximalist sound that draws equally from the academic avant-garde and the left-field rock canon from the '60s to the present day has won the group a small but fervent fan base. After its release, Tasankokaiku was immediately recognized by reviewers and music fans as a compelling cocktail of accessibility and ambitious aspirations, a kaleidoscopic mix of edgy 8-bit bleepiness and soft-focus psychedelia. Vinonaamakasio picks up where that record left off, but this time absolutely explodes into the cosmos with an unrelenting squall of swirling organ patterns, droning guitars, ring modulator death-rays, and an impenetrable wall of percussion, sweeping the past 30 years of Krautrock, psych, prog, and electronic innovation up into your dizzy, expanding head-space."
- LabelFonal
- UPC7332181025736