Australian deconstructionist noise/jazz collective Kurushimi return with ‘What Is Chaos?’, an immersive sonic journey across time and space.
On their previous EPs ‘Shōtotsu’ and ‘Kurushimi’, the group conjured a style of experimental jazz that seemed to be drowned in a thick, hallucongenic tar. Like a gradually expanding black hole, the band pulled elements of prog, drone and extreme metal towards itself while continually obliterating any sense of rhythmic or melodic centre.
Now, with ‘What Is Chaos?’, Kurushimi have allowed their collective unconscious to run free. The result is awe-inspiring. Each of the album’s varied tracks stream by in a violent flourish of creative destruction.
Their new single, ‘A Glimpse Of Thursday Afternoon’, sounds as if Buckethead – twisted on DMT – burst into a smokey New York jazz club in the 1950s accompanied by a deranged robotic sidekick.
‘Yuruyaka na shi no ma no kanbi naru mezame’ sounds like Kilamanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble screaming across a void after unwittingly ingesting a potent dose of psilocybin.
Tracks like ‘Ether Rag Addiction’ and ‘C8H10N4O2’ pay tribute to the group’s spiritual leader John Zorn and his work with Painkiller and Naked City. It’s a fitting tribute to the original noise-jazz deconstructionists, and provides at least some reference for this staggering piece of art music.
This is lucid dreaming for psychedelic jazz heads hiding in Scandinavian forests with a battle axe and raised claw; a message from some indeterminate future, where all art, music and culture has collapsed in on itself, leaving behind a whirring chaotic patchwork of symbols, styles, ideas and mediums.
(Well there you go: this is the first piece of music to ever remind of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game – the play of which involves creating an abstract synthesis across the entirety of the arts and sciences to establish deep and beautiful connections between seemingly unrelated topics.)
Kurushimi have rendered the boundaries between particular styles and genres meaningless. They have revealed the strings that were, until now, completely invisible. In doing so they have pushed us to the very borders of language, and the very borders of music.
Kurushimi’s What Is Chaos is released via Art As Catharsis on 13 September.
Their new single ‘A Glimpse Of A Thursday Afternoon’ is out now.
