Bokoboko [Import]

Burnt Friedman presents his fourth solo album, following up the 2007 masterpiece 'First Night Forever'. 'Bokoboko' is an entirely instrumental recording, impossible to pinpoint to existing genres of music. 'Bokoboko' comes from the Japanese, like the other track titles, and means 'uneven', 'hollow-sounding' adjectives aptly describing the album s crooked, dynamic grooves as well as the many percussively resounding instruments. Friedman, recognizable more or less by the sound of the ten instrumental tracks, plays prepared oil barrels/steel drums, all kinds of wood and metal percussion, gongs, monochord, a home-made rubber-band guitar, organ, synthesizer, and electric guitar. He is sometimes joined by Hayden Chisolm (wind instruments), Joseph Suchy (guitar), Daniel Schröter (bass), as well as, making his first guest appearance, Takeshi Nishimoto, a Berlin-based Japanese musician playing the sarod, a traditional Indian string instrument. The uneven types of rhythm, which provide the specific oscillation on which all the tracks are based, in principle obey all the components: melodies, noises, monophone sequences and dub echoes inserted into pre-sketched, programmed basic tracks. The tracks of the current production, like those in Secret Rhythms, Friedman s live-and-studio project with Jaki Liebezeit, must be viewed as intermediate phases in an on-going process. They are not finalized, completed pieces that permit no further alteration, nor do they correspond to the idea of an original with unmistakable identity. On the contrary: permutability is their salient feature, and they are built according to a plan that follows natural laws. 'Deku No Bo' (track 3) and 'Sendou' (track 4) follow the same rhythmic formula, the same seven-part cyclic groove, even it is hard to discover any superficial resemblance between the two. The same is basically true of the three parts of 'Rimuse' ('Dance') (tracks 1 and 9 on the CD; the first part is available exclusively on the vinyl EP Zen'Aku, released in 2011). Here an even groove (four) is superimposed over the one divided into ten. 'Bokoboko' (track 8) follows the rhythmic pattern of eleven (divided into eight and three), and was last deployed under the title '120-11', most recently mixed for Secret Rhythms 4. The first two Flanger albums (1997 99, with AtomTM) and Burnt Friedman s Just Landed (1999) and Con Ritmo (2000) still aimed to juxtapose fully programmed, electronically generated productions ('reality constructions') with the universally known production model involving instruments that were actually played. The 'authentic' sound of the programmed music revealed the inherent artificiality of the 'real' productions. In Secret Rhythms, and now Bokoboko, it is no longer a question of mixing, simulating or faking genres that already exists the aim is to invent music that is extra-territorial, non-national, non-place. 'The entire Industrial movement in England was not just inspired by Can, Cluster and Kraftwerk they were all-pervasive. As an Englishman it s hard for me to judge just how German the German avantgarde was back then. But I reckon very little about it was specifically German, otherwise those bands wouldn t have become so important for musicians around the globe. I even believe the Germans put up much more resistance to being identified with their country than we Brits did. I was always fascinated by how international Can were: maybe they used world receivers, Morse code and Afro beats because they wanted to distance themselves from that accursed image? We were so fascinated by Can precisely because they treated all forms of national or ethnic music purely as a question of the sound and in that way arrived at an international form.' Richard H. Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) in Martin Büsser´s Tes

2CD