posted 10/21/2008 (Tue) @ 01:45 pm
>>> Music Reviews
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble (2006)
Dark Jazz / Ambient Electronic / Instrumental
The pixelated snows of Kilimanjaro
- The Nothing Changes
- Pearls for Swine
- Adaptation of the Koto Song
- Lobby
- Parallel Corners
- Rivers of Congo
- Solomon’s Curse
- Amygdhala
- Guernican Perspectives
- Vegas
- March of the Swine
“Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz sync up, you know,” lots of Pink Floyd faithful will no doubt tell you. Even if it isn’t true, it’s a grand idea for a concept album. Just ask Jason Köhnen and Gideon Kiers. Their music takes inspiration from the blackest of black and white silent films noir. Think Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, strung along on upright/fretless bass, macabre strings, and the muted explosions of synthetic drums.
Some genre mash-ups are patently transparent. Others are contrasting noises, expertly sewn together into one seamless piece of musical stitchwork. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble’s music falls into the latter category. Their approach to genre synthesis is one which avoids comparison, sidestepping melodrama and concocting with their wordless alchemy something uniquely unsettling, dark, and musically rich on par with Matt Uelmen’s Diablo soundtracks. One need only observe the lo-fi music box / sampler drum groove of “Pearls for Swine” or “Lobby” to get on board. The latter’s heavy on the bass/beats/howling machinery outro, encroaching on industrial territory, takes the Ambien out of ambient and replaces it with a mechanized pounding in your head.
Or take the laid-back “Amygdhala,” the cleverness of which doesn’t end at its name. Stabs of violin broach the track, joined and intensified by something like an electronic flute. The flute pelts out a creepily childlike melody over swooning, fedback trombone tremors, generating the most Salad Fingers inducing moment of the disc.
Subdued, dark jazz piano and slices of soulful horn color and adorn the percussion-driven “Adaptation of the Koto Song,” while “Vegas” eschews earth-bound instrumentation entirely, in favor of a blip-blopping trek into the first circles of Aphex Twin’s rabid, mutated electronic netherworld.
Their fusion avoids comparison and defies description. Slowly dripping ambient-jazz, dark and unsettling. At times, it seems, a modern electronic counterpart to Bitches Brew.
If The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble (the album) tickles your fancy but leaves you hanging on for more, you may also like Robert Sabin’s Romero, a caustic, dark jazz recast of the soundtracks to George A. Romero’s Living Dead movies. For more outside-the-box jazz, try Rail.
Links
Download (Sirens Sound) (support art, pay the musicians if you like it)
Myspace
Tags: ambient, dark jazz, electronic influence, film noir, jazz, romero, silent film scores, the kilimanjaro darkjazz ensemble
