New Music: Aa, Babils

Aa - Horse Streak (Deleted Art 2007)

Aa - gAame / Deleted Art

This spring has seen a mighty battle of sorts between those hellbent on brilliant percussion - groups like Konono No. 1 who are about to embark on a tour in support of Björk (or maybe it's the other way around? Or both?) or LCD Soundsystem or Adult. or OOIOO - and the groups who would rather let their good old-fashioned instruments do the talking - groups like Cyann & Ben, A Sunny Day in Glasgow or The Twilight Sad. There has been astonishing quality from both ends of the musical spectrum, but if you go far enough out there on one end of said spectrum, you're bound to find yourself winding up on the other end. So far out there you inhabit the infinity symbol off the charts. That's where Brooklyn quintet Aa find themselves... But please, call them "Big A little a" (or, as I prefer, simply "Big Little"; there don't appear to be any artists out there with this name at the moment).

The glorious thing about Aa is that, like what lies beyond the visible reaches of a spectrum, there's no definition to this band. Everybody's a percussionist. Everybody's flailing around drums or maracas or electronically manipulating chants and choruses and singalongs and I wouldn't be surprised if they threw in a kitchen sink à la Hurra Torpedo because a group like Aa wouldn't be afraid of it. These guys just don't give a damn.

And that's kind of why they inhabit the nether-reaches in the way they do: You go so far off the percussion end of the spectrum that eventually you come around to the analog sounds, the very basic key sequences of a track like the epic "Horse Streak" drawing you in with a mystical trance. Swerving backward through songs like "Best of Seven" is the vocals, never clear and almost totally unrecognizable as such in some cases. This haze makes you feel like you're totally disoriented, which is definitely something gAame can be.

Remember in the 80s when Burundi beats and Safari polyrhythms acted as the counterweight to synthpop and slick-rock drivel? Aa have learned from that and, like latter-day Boredoms or a less pop-thoughtful Animal Collective, astonishingly melted the scale that was balancing those weights in the first place. It still sounds like a jungle, of course: High-pitched yelps from the dense brush of the first song proper ("Best of Seven") and later in the album ("New Machine") still reveal that African influence in more than just the drums. But this paranoid backdrop is placated by tunes like "Walk Again" that stroll through the jungle mist with placid irreverence only to find that what lies at the other end is "Time In," a kind of built-in remix with 8-bit bullets firing as percussion and those eerie swells of what sound like something organic living beneath yet another fuzzed-out voice.

I feel like I've brought up Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in passing quite often on here, but Aa have achieved another, different kind of soundtrack to the same book: Instead of being from the perspective of the Europeans as per the norm, gAame shows life in the Congo from the side of the natives. And what a wildly inventive, erratically vibrant life it is.












Babils - Preventorium (Stilll 2007)

Babils - The Joint Between / Stilll

Another quintet knows what being wildly inventive and erratically vibrant is all about, but with a totally different sensibility to them. Tongue-twisting Brussels band Babils build their monolithic debut The Joint Between out of leftover scraps from the Can discography and all those Japanese psych bands your mother told you about. Another Alex Delivery? Well, not quite: There's a difference here from Star Destroyer because it takes elements of free-jazz that prog performers often dabble in and runs it through the patented Les Rallizes Denudes windtunnel-of-fun for a truly mind-altering psychgazing extravaganza.

That's a mouthful, but if you've ever heard The Psychic Paramount's Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural, you have a vague idea of what I'm talking about. It's just such a massive record, but the glory is that it can be as heavy or as quiet as you like. Though a lot of these songs run well over five minutes, the centerpiece is without a doubt the 11-minute "Dent de Sagesse," which flitters through an almost Arab-like flute-charming session as Etienne Vernaeve and Lukas Vangheluwe tamper with the cymbals in and out, like desert waves or the dancing of a cobra streetside. Eventually low-frequency guitars circle the flute and mighty waves of feedback and droning UFOs hover back, sweeping up the song to leave only the rustle of the grass behind. While Alex Delivery lays on the sauerkraut repetition thick, Babils revel more in the flighty whims of late-60s freak-outs and enveloping guitar squall. I say this not to demean the former but rather to distance these two groups because, having realized we just recently posted on them, I wouldn't want you confused.

I don't think that's going to be an issue after hearing "2=3," a take accurately described by Fluxblog as something akin to both Radiohead's "The National Anthem" and Primal Scream's "Blood Money." But the squonking horns aren't unique to this song; brass frequents the album in the form of Vangheluwe's trumpets and maybe even a sax here or there. One of Babils' assets is point-man Gabriel Severin who is noted in the Brussels scene for a variety of projects, and to be fair I'm not really sure how much percussion Vangheluwe contributed to this album, but I'd like to believe that his efforts were just as valuable as Michel Duyck's simmering six-string action.

But why split hairs? At the end of the day it's the collective effort that merits the notoriety and, regardless of what happens behind the scenes in the Babils compound, the output on their debut is worth not poring over the details for. There's a mass of psych-rock out there right now, but sometimes it's difficult to tell the good from the bad and what's worth listening to and what just isn't. Babils may not have much more than an LP to their credit, but the elephants on the cover and the roar of "Hommes Elephants" are too loud to ignore. Have you ever ignored an elephant when it was trying to get your attention? Here's some terse advice if you've never been caught in the predicament: Don't. That is all.