Dusted Reviews
Artist: Boredoms Album: Seadrum / House of Sun Label: Warner Music Japan Review date: Jan. 7, 2005 |
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Just as they hit warp speed cresting for take-off from Earth’s pull on 1999’s Vision Creation Newsun, Osaka’s Boredoms disappeared in smoke. Remerging on the other end of the telescope as V∞redoms, a tribe of drummers under the stewardship of lead Bore Yamatsuka Eye, they have enigmatically issued the new Seadrum/House of Sun long-player under the moniker of Eye’s former terrestrial incarnation. A Japan-only release, it is the group’s first transmissions from their interplanetary sit-in. Lost in space due to apparent label wrangling, the source material for the record’s two 20-minute-plus tracks dates back several years in the v∞rtex.
A-side “Seadrum” originates from sessions recorded with drum kits played as they were slowly submerged in coastal tides. Just landed on their far-off Elysian shore, waves crashing, these cosmic yetis hardly evoke the toxic warfare and noise discharge Boredoms canonized a decade ago. Yoshimi P-We, also of OOIOO and widely known for her victorious pink robot battle, incants freeform mouth tones channeling Alice Coltrane’s monastic consciousness and wisps of Christina Carter shuteye koans on the track’s bare intro. Chimes tinkle as the air fills with fierce clusters of rhythm, a thousand concentric drum circles. By the fifth minute, piano sprinkles spatter over the multiplied drumming as Eye twiddles the layered groove on its astral course. Passages of the extensive jam seem to quote or even lift entire sections of Newsun’s ecstatic throb, though stripped down to crisp litheness. Vesuvius spilling lysergic cotton-candy, “Seadrum”’s constant blaze burns out into crystal spume, a suitably elemental disintegration for such vitamin-rich krautrock compost.
Though its title evokes the last Boredoms album, “House of Sun” is far more Acid Mothers dark-matter raga than Newsun’s communal vibrations. A tangle of sitar trails and electric guitar slither, its lack of beats is particularly noticeable coming after “Seadrum”’s percussive boogie. It lumbers and whirrs filling its requisitely massive length not without entrancing properties. Two compact chunks that could have made a gooier whole, one can certainly consider the potential excellence of “Seadrum”’s sprawling galaxy-march against some “House of Sun” morphed licks. Until then, the mashing is all in the mind.
By Bernardo Rondeau
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