First Glances – Million Brazilians
You can’t simply dip your toe into the pan-global, predominantly Eastern-flavoured pool of tribal psyche that Million Brazilians brew. They’re a total immersion collective for whom there’s no other option than to take the plunge – and preferably a ritualistic cliff dive into the really deep end.
The Portland band have just dropped a pretty out-there LP called Wet Dry Jungala via Moon Glyph / Psychic Sounds Research and it’s chock-a-block with primal rumbles and cannibalistic hand-drummed rhythms from the heart of darkness, its depth of exotic instrumentation ripped straight from some free-jazz souk. Yes, it’s basically as mad and busy as the artwork would have you believe.
Meditative glottal pulses conjure midnight camel rides to sunken oases. Percussive drones evoke mystic scenes of fragmented spirituality akin to that trippy snake parable scene in the desert in Natural Born Killers . None of the release’s nine tracks have been named, which feeds the sense of dislocation further. “Untitled II”, for example, comes on like those modern voodoo children Goat on a canoe-full of downers. “Untitled V” synthesises the croak of bullfrogs against a disembodied spoken sample that creeps into the edge of conscious at too slow a speed.
If all this sounds like a psychedelic jumble that’s because it is. It’s so easy to get swept away by these stoned streams-of-consciousness. Quite simply, Wet Dry Jungala is the sort of future soup they’d be listening to in Blade Runner if, firstly, it hadn’t been made in the early 80s and, secondly, nuclear war had first taken out North America, Europe, as well as most of the Orient.
~Wet Dry Jungala is out now via the collaborative efforts of Moon Glyph and Psychic Sounds Research.~