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あふりらんぽ (Afrirampo) We Are Ucho No Ko

This, the apparent final chapter of the real Japanese Psychedelic duo, Afrirampo, is a real interesting thing. Even if you are familiar with Afrirampo’s excellent history it’s not the easiest group to 1. know how the hell you feel about them and 2. tell others how you think they are worth the time of day. Being in the presence of them live is something that (now) is not going to be happening any time soon. However, if you had had the chance to see the gals live, what you get is a weird distribution.  The audience ends up being much like what you’d maybe expect – a collection consisting of people who know why they are there, people who have not the faintest idea as to why they are there, people who just like watching bird-like creatures make things up live! because a friend told them about it, a few others who read the rags smashed into the corners of the Internet, a female or two and, finally, everyone getting the chance to see some legitimately improvised music between two sister-like lifeforms. If you don’t talk about the live aspect of a band like Afrirampo when talking about Afrirampo then you would be missing the point, maybe.

(We’re not talking about We Are Uchu No Ko, yet.) Whatever you think about Japanese Psychedelic music, or however indifferent you are to it all Afrirampo is getdelicious’ pick for The Most Complete-est, Subjectively Obvious Group of 2010 DUH!

The Uchu No Ko album spasms, screams, cat calls, bird rills, drum kicks and guitar scratches it’s way out of the cosmos with the frivolity and consequence I am inclined to believe that no band in the United States is currently capable of. If an American band did something even remotely similar sounding to Afrirampo they may have immediately found themselves terrorists or a semi-giant success.  Realistically they would have been handcuffed by the Serious Police, where they would then have been taken away to what Huey P.Newton calls, “The Soul Breaker” – never to be let out ever again, and never to perform music again. OK.  Getting arrested would probably not happen, but you seriously cannot really expect to escape from 2010′s contemporary music landscape composed of analog dregs, fairy dust throwback, or the city-boy-gone-fishin’ trend, unless you built a room in your house whose design it is to have you crawl into it with the intention of never crawling out of it again – or you could simply listen to We Are Uchu No Ko. You don’t have to be forced to excavate Rock and Roll’s past in order to take a break from the “new” stuff that you may not be crazy about. What we’re saying is that you can like brand new music that isn’t one of those three genres that seemed to be 2010’s “the things to listen to”. You don’t have to start liking Norweigan Death Metal either – although, that stuff’s super good most of the time. Instead, get We Are Uchu No Ko! Listen to it. Let all the endearing, exaggerated enthusiasm touch your heart, and let all the chaos, animal lech and psychedelic gun-cocking hit you where it hurts so good.

I have a friend. One of my only real friends I guess. It’s tenuous though. He may possibly think of me as less of his friend than I would think he is a good friend of mine. We play in a band together and he writes about video games. What’s important here is that in the case of Afrirampo he had said something extraordinarily significant.  In fact I think it may have become the most-rightest sounding critique  about a band I have ever heard, ever. He doesn’t even write about music, at least publicly. I am young though so I imagine I’ll hear other really correct-sounding stuff later on however indifferent about the prospects of that I really am. This “right sounding thing” he said was veiled, as it was just about Afrirampo. It could be extrapolated onto all performance and music(-theory), especially when talking about the “real stuff”.

So it was about them and how intricate seeing what it is Afrirampo does live as opposed to how they sound on record. To go into it with proper depth and reverence would mean I would have to start crumbling nuggets of crack into my coffee, which would give me the power to stay awake for a week and allow me the focus required to get it out, and get it out the right way. Instead I’ll just paraphrase: ‘ Afrirampo, I think,’ and this is him paraphrase-ily speaking, ‘after playing a song they’ve already kind of written, and then playing it out on tour, put their music down on record in order to kill the song – I think – rather than have that song reinforce a part of any current record.’

Afrirampo and the We Are Uchu No Ko album are like some bizarre, technological cave painting. Maybe the record matters but what’s implied in the will to conceptualize things like Afrirampo, it is so much less important to hear without it also being great to watch.  That is a mystifying sentence.  Afrirampo manages to bridge the divide between performance art and just being music in the same way that a bird of paradise doesn’t get laid without also dancing.