OOIOO - "Mountain Book" from the album Green & Gold


Someone once said of Can that it was the sound of the sons of Nazis trying, and failing, to play rock and roll. Their attempt to appropriate American music, however, produced something new and unique, and something distinctly German. Much like the Germans, the Japanese have appropriated Western pop music for their own ends, and in the process have created a hybrid something that, to these Western ears, is endlessly fascinating. The sound of Western pop music put through an interpretive process perhaps not unlike that of English to Japanese back to English, creates a similar kind of wacky poetry.

This particular example comes from OOIOO, a side project of Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms. OOIOO are basically a more glossy, neon-glow version of the Boredoms, with Yoshimi's unique sense of melody and rhythm always up front. The song consists of a simple but profoundly beautiful melody sung by at least two (probably more) women over and over. At first behind the melody, but eventually up front, and finally drowning out the melody altogether, is the rhythm section, a seemingly chaotic but sweetly textured melange of sounds that only slowly and after several listens gives way to any sense of order in the ear of the listener.

The structure and design of the song is similar to Miles Davis' Nefertiti. That piece begins with Davis' trumpet and Wayne Shorter's sax playing a similarly beautiful melody. If I knew more about music I could probably describe how the melodies work in almost the exact same way--but the most important thing is that they are both circular (there's no logical stopping point, it just goes on and on). On Nefertiti the melody is offset with the clattering and yet somehow muscular drumming of Tony Williams. Since Williams would never be content to fade to the background of a song anyway, one can imagine Miles having this idea while listening to him splatter his drums all over his other performances. Both songs make the rhythm the changing and evolving section of the music, while the melody, so to speak, keeps the rhythm.

The effect of switching the melody and the rhthym section is, ironically, a new kind of emphasis on the melody. It is constantly alienated from the listener, and, in both pieces, at times obscured all together to eventually achieve a kind of repetitive sublime.