Woo - Awaawaa

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  • For decades the music made by Woo drifted maddeningly just out of reach. Since the 1970s, British brothers Mark and Clive Ives would hole up in a small terraced house in South London and make hours of peculiar home recordings, but the music never traveled far. Of its own era, it most resembled the Penguin Café Orchestra. Brian Eno's E.G. label would have been a perfect fit for Woo, too, but they wound up self-releasing their music instead. They've since hovered outside of time, not easy to track or pin down. Only in 2012 did Woo's discography begin to be properly reissued and re-evaluated, first by indie label Drag City and then by Britain's dance floor curio specialists Emotional Rescue. Now comes the fifth release of Woo's music in the past four years, this time from the same label that brought us Mariah's similarly unclassifiable album, Utakata No Hibi. According to the liner notes, Awaawaa dates back to the band's earliest recordings, from the mid-'70s until the early '80s. Woo's woozy sound world is hard to categorize. It's ambient and electronic, though the instruments that most often rise to the fore are strummed guitars and woodwinds, phase-shifted on a track like "Green Blob" until it's hard to discern where their timbres begin and end. Woo bear similarities to the gentler side of kosmische (think Cluster's Sowiesoso, early Faust and Can's "Ethnological Forgery Series"), and their lyrical guitar lines bring to mind the likes of Durutti Column. New age fans will delight in the relaxed feel that permeates Awaawaa; a five-minute track like "The Goodies" is both easy to get lost in and easy to hum. "Tick Tock," "Fun, The Final Frontier" and the title track sound like a jazz trio, if heard from deep down a storm drain. Which might raise the question of how an album like this could appeal to electronic music fans. The Ives brothers' warped sonic strategies bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, which often ran recordings of classical piano and brass bands through a number of effects until they became a luminous haze. Had Voigt been taken with sunny afternoons rather than forests at midnight, Gas might've sounded like Awaawaa. In that manner, Woo could be seen as the estranged uncles of the Pop Ambient form, imagining a beatless, beatific future.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Odd Spiral A2 Green Blob A3 Mobile Phone A4 The Goodies A5 Homage to Matta A6 Sympti A7 Tick Tock B1 Awaawaa B2 Back on Track B3 Ruby Past Lives B4 Wobbly B5 Robots Dancing B6 Babalonia B7 Sailing B8 Fun, The Final Frontier B9 Fanfare
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