(((rather embarrassed to confess that a lot of this stuff has been right under my nose, in terms of djs pushing the records and musicians getting remixed, and that i've only recently begun to take notice . . . . perhaps b/c i depend too much on dissensus for tips on music, and dissensus has been asleep on the balearic trend)))
Mungolian Jet Set - When You're in Need (Is a Constant Thing in Change)
Splendid Balearica from Norway with Bugge Wesseltoft behind the piano. The whole album is superb, but this is the stand-out track.
Aaaaaanyway, here is a
Norwegian review of Mungolian Jet Set’s album
Beauty Came to Us in Stone — laboriously translated by yours truly. Most of the stylistic oddities are in the original text, so you know whom not to blame. =)
Exotica — a genre spawned by Martin Denny’s 1957 album with the same name. Although initially popular, it lost some of its commercial clout throughout the 60s. Denny’s album, and the genre it gave birth to, was mainly about conjuring images of an exotic place, preferably a distant resort, and about mentally transporting the listener from his sofa into the ‘jungle’. On
Exotica, Denny strived to imitate the music of the islanders in Oceania, but the instrumentation he used bore little or no resemblance to the one actually used there.
It should go without saying what Strangefruit [one third of Mungolian Jet Set and one of Norway’s most famed DJs] is on to with this album. And to emphasize that it’s an album about imitations, the group’s name is spelled with a
u, rather than with an
o. However, to brand the album a mere genre exercise, aimed at manipulating the listeners’ ‘hearts and minds’, is a misnomer. It’s equally about immensely rhythmic club music and hard, dance-friendly beats. Strangefruit has sneaked in a truss of samples between the rhythms, and it’s these that form the backbone for the imitations and the ‘transportation’. There are samples of Rupert Hine’s band Quantum Jump — ‘Captain Boogaloo’ and ‘The Lone Ranger’ — the latter hit song lending an up-tempo sample to the fourth track, ‘Navigator’:
Taumata-whaka-tangi? hanga-ku-ay-uwu? tamate-aturi-tekaku-piki-maunga? horonuku-apokai-awhaka-whenu-tahu? mataku-atananu-akaba-miki-tora.
This is simply a chant in Maori, and thusly the Maori name for a town in New Zealand [sic]. Incorporated into a texture simmering with intense and funky rhythms, it truly brings the listener’s fantasy afoot. Furthermore, there are samples of gypsy singing on ‘Technon Thai’. And the last track, ‘When You’re in Need (Is a Constant Thing in Change)’, features no one less than Lappish singer Nils Aslak Valkeapää. ‘Technon Thai’ is perhaps the coolest track — Håvard Wiik’s wringing and tonedropping on a Fender Rhodes shepherds it unto the climes of Miles Davis’
Bitches Brew. Wiik is but one of many invited musicians spicying things up; others include: Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass guitar), Wetle Holte (percussion), Paal Nilssen-Love (percussion), Roger Ludvigsen (guitar), Bugge Wesseltoft (‘rhythms’) and Jan Bang (‘rhythms’). What strikes you after a few sittings with
Beauty Came to Us in Stone, apart from it being a quaint stimulus for the feet and the intellect alike, is the musicality it must have taken moulding such disparate elements into an euphonious whole.
The album sprang out of a wish from Bugge Wesseltoft for Strangefruit to produce an album for the
Jazzland Records label in the spirit of Miles Davis’ electrical period. On the whole, it’s clear that Strangefruit paid heed to the instructions, but Miles is but one of several influences to imbue this brilliant album. Adding to those already mentioned, Strangefruit has added to the sonic canvas a jungle of elusive sound bites, which add to the album being difficult to stamp with a brand.
Beauty Came to Us in Stone is in many ways a horn of ebullience, with baroque elements and ornaments occupying every nook of its being. Even if it brushes against exotica, IDM, jazz, funk, glitch and funk, it defies classification.
Beauty Came to Us in Stone is simply a firework of a record.
— Carl Kristian Johansen, 22.01.2007
