MU.ZZ.LE… Strangely not lacking in bite
Review: Gonjasufi – MU.ZZ.LE
Published on February 8th, 2012 | Jonny Abrams
Album: Gonjasufi – MU.ZZ.LE (Warp)
The buzz: Mini-album follow-up to 2010’s debut long-player A Sufi and a Killer, recorded and mixed at the home of Gonjasufi head honcho and part-time yoga instructor Sumach Ecks. In his own words:
[The record is] a way to reflect on my actions. It’s very emotional and dark, the record. It’s been a dark time of my life, probably the darkest, but I’ve been able to manoeuvre through that and turn the darkness into light.
“Nikels and Dimes”
Sounds like: A dark, beatsy, gritty journey through a fevered and distracted Californian mind. Ecks’s alluringly smoky lunatic’s croon is the ideal voice to accompany you through the psychedelic smog, stumbling and slurring over the glitch-hop beats like some addled prophet of doom, yet inviting and caressing enough to convince you that this wild-eyed stranger is worth sticking by for the journey through the murky, desolate streets ahead.
The pervading air of somnambulant menace mightn’t go down too easily spread across an album proper, but clocking in at comfortably under half an hour, MU.ZZ.LE’s disorienting wooziness and abrupt transitions perfectly capture the disturbing otherworldliness of a lucid anxiety dream; that might not sound like your idea of a good time, but filtered through the beneficial perspective of actually being awake, it’s a strangely mesmerising alternative to…well, more or less everything else out there.
“Feedin’ Birds”
MU.ZZ.LE may have ditched the relative array of colour presented by Gaslamp Killer’s production on A Sufi and a Killer, but with repeated listens tracks like “Nikels and Dimes” and “The Blame” (coincidentally, at 3:50 and 3:25 apiece, the two longest tracks on the album) acquire a kind of gloomy majesty that’s hard not to fall perversely in love with. You might find it hard to return to the ‘real’ world afterwards, but you’ll ultimately revel in the mind-expanding properties of having been led so unsettlingly astray.
In a few words: A bad trip preserved for posterity as a really rather enjoyable little album. Work that one out, future generations.
Kind of like a cross between: Asleep and awake
MU.ZZ.LE is out now on Warp Records. For more information, please visit www.sufisays.com
About the Author
Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.
