Ken Ueno and Wukir Suryadi – Earth Song

Blue Tapes

Through cicada hiss and chuckling wildlife, echoing plucks and plonks are layered. Lovely glinty guitar fragments, flute and rainstick bamboo canoodle as the duo tentatively feels each other’s boundaries, fluttering the mix with apparitional goodness.

Slow‘n’steady, lulling mirroring sounds — then just when you think it’s grasping towards some om-like union, a repetitive carpet of agitated frets throws things splendidly off-piste, the canvas suddenly gripped in an overfed rebound and answering recoil. A lead heavy reverberation getting down to an animalistic Metgumbnerbone-like embrace that’s kind of scary.

A brutally breathtaking feast, percussively bounced into a conversational rhythmic and vocalised blackness. This over-saturated, shaman clad, skin purring, caustic bone machine of wonder is a captivating one. Sundown-slipping some nice spiritual ooozinessss, leaning into the ambient before exploding in some impressive speaker-shredding carnality.

Like Francisco de Goya looking into the carved-out scream of some ceremonial mask — I guarantee, you haven’t heard anything this off the scale in ages. Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa fame has crafted his instruments from abandoned ploughs, and Ken Ueno’s sounds are just as extraordinary, both creating this hallucinatory bloat of tyre-skidding colour that’s fanatically forked and ritually intense, all performed live on a Javanese hillside.

Earth Song is a seriously good primal pleasure.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-