steering clear of the mainstream
since 2001

june 2010

review
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info opinion

Chora

"Plume Like" CD

Zerojardins

Genre: freaky Fridays

Peckham, UK

January 2010

Recorded live though I don't know where, Chora's Plume Like collects three improvisations from these Peckham-based adventurers. Centred by main duo Rob Lye and Ben Morris (joined by I-have-no-idea-who), the troupe jiggies their way from start to finish here, turning in an often joyful effort.

Title-track "Plume Like" begins with a strange rattle and birdlike coos, with the clattering slowly becoming more and more prominent. Eventually the guitars take centre-stage, the track wrestling itself into an increasingly depraved industrial soundscape. From the halfway mark on, a dreadfully delightful passage of dirty guitar drone takes over, raw like a Thurston Moore outtake, and made to be blared through a warehouse. This grimy noise lays in sharp contrast to the next improvisation, "Tap Head," which is a bubbly stew of percussive clink/clanking, all junky-like. While it succeeds in evoking a vague sense of ominousness, it nevertheless fails to accomplish anything particularly original, ultimately ranking as the record's least interesting feature. The lengthy final track (clocking in at an expansive twenty minutes) then hits with a cheery bang, performed ratter-tatterly as a multi-staged, psychedelic jam session constructed around a noise-and-percussion back bone. Overhead the listener is forced to defer to a tasty section of tribal guitar strums, yearning sax swoops, and spacey drones. This is very enticing and vaguely tuneful stuff -- a noteworthy length of improv that's more than just disorganized instrumental blather. I believe they're calling this stuff 'avant-freak' or some such hyphenated bubb-rubb nowadays.

chora's myspace

Michael Tau

[Vitals: 3 tracks, distributed by the label, released March 2007]