So freeform it makes the phrase 'freeform' sound constrictive, this spellbinding band construct a maze of false starts, clicks, overdriven digital screams, furious silences and extreme noise
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This track by the Nigerian band Billy Bao is not really one track at all: it's many tracks run into one sequence. That deep-reverb womb ambience at 14:00 deconstructs itself completely, beckons in a long period of silence, before making you jump out of your skin with a catastrophically damaged blast of a painfully ruined snippet of what might, once, have been Afrobeat at 16:19. Then again, perhaps they're not "tracks", and perhaps there's no "sequence". Who of us can really say?
My favourite Billy Bao "song" is the one that starts with an echoing handclap at 24:02 in. The track before is so deliberately aggravating it makes the Cardiacs sound like JLS, while this one – as ever with Billy Bao, no names, no pack-drill – has a fantastically relaxed air. Or rather, it does until 25:25 when a brutal, demonic howl slowly fades in, only to suddenly disappear, leaving just that lone clap, before, at 27:57, it all explodes into a gleefully violent carnival of shattering noise. It is the most breathtaking, invigorating thing I can remember hearing for some time.
The band's "vocalist" – a fairly loose definition – is a Nigerian chap called William who left Lagos and arrived in Bilbao in 1986. He fell in with the local punk scene, and the band was formed. "We do not write songs," William said recently. "We do not rehearse. We either are recording or we are playing live." He also described an earlier release of theirs as "35 minutes [of] incandescent poison made out of misery and deception", but, hey, there are upsides, too. Urban Disease is a largely electronic maze of false starts, clicks, overdriven digital screams, furious silences and extreme noise. Very little is certain, except that your journey through this spellbindingly odd album will grip you from beginning to end. Just don't put it on at bedtime.
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by Rob Fitzpatrick via Music: Electronic music | guardian.co.uk
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