Various Artists
Exotic ésotérique Vol.2
Artetetra
Various Artists
Jungle Judgin' / Holypalms remix compilation
Artetetra
by Simon Reynolds
A visually pleasing palindrome, “Artetetra” also secretes
within itself a clue to the concerns of the Italian label of the same
name. “Tetra” means “four” and the Fourth World, Jon Hassell’s Eighties
term for audio hybrids of West and non-West, is the placeless place out of
which emanate Artetetra musics. The label goes one better at its bandcamp
page, claiming citizenship of Quinto Mondo: the Fifth World. That slight
escalation points to the internet’s impact on a new generation of music makers
whose creative headspace is utterly deterritorialised, omnivorous
audio-tourists able to scavenge influences galore without ever leaving their
desks. Indeed INTERNET HOLIDAYS™ is the sly title of a joint project by
Artetetra artists Hybrid Palms and Cheap Galapagos.
The “Mondo” in Quinto Mondo further winks at the
Italy-spawned Sixties genre of exploitation films: documentaries whose
voyeuristic enjoyment at ethnic curiosities paralleled the exotica boom of
faux-Polynesian easy listening and tiki bars. Blithely unbothered
by issues like exploitation and misappropriation, not just refusing to fret
about the danger of ethno-kitsch but actively enjoying the ersatz and
fictitious, Artetetra inhabit a free-for-all world where time and space,
history and geography, get guiltlessly jumbled up.
Officially based out of their Adriatic coastal hometown
Potenza Picena but operating mostly from Bologna these days, Artetetra is a
little over two years old. During that time it’s released eleven single-artist
albums and two compilations: Exotic ésotérique Vol.1, which launched the
label, and the polemically-themed collection My Goddess has a Crazy Bush,
a protest against pubic depilation and a celebration of “the natural
look”. Now come two more compilations: Exotic ésotérique Vol.2,
and Jungle Judgin', on which the Artetetra roster rework tracks
from labelmate Holypalms’s 2016 album Jungle Judge.
A Moscow-based producer whose music is a frenetic,
glittering meshwork of West African and South Asian rhythms, Holypalms is a
typical Artetetra outernationalist. Other names seem like they might be
alter-egos for the enigmatic duo behind the label. And still others come with
colourful back stories that may have you wondering if they’re
fabulations. King Gong’s Erhai Floating Sound, for instance - the
label’s stand-out release so far – was supposedly recorded on the Chinese
lake Erhai from a fishing boat connected by underwater cables to four other
boats each carrying a speaker. “Pull the other one!” was my instant thought,
but it seems that King Gong really is the alias of independent
ethnomusicologist Laurent Jeanneau, who roams the Far East
archiving vanishing folk musics and then electronically modulates the source
sounds ( voices, gongs, Chinese mouth organs, etc) into creations like Floating
Sound.
King Gong is oddly absent from Exotic ésotérique Vol.2
(although he does contribute one of the more low-key moments on the otherwise
rambunctiously energetic and entertaining Holypalms remix album). Indeed Vol.
2 is as much a foretaste of signings and releases to come as it is a
showcase of output to date, featuring unfamiliar names like The Mauskovic Dance
Band and Los Siquicos Litoraleños. Described as a wunderkammer, a sonic
cabinet of curiosities, and blended seamlessly in the mix-tape
style, the compilation is far more assured and intriguing than its
predecessor (now regarded as a juvenile stumble by the label). The first
side “Exotic” is – as the title suggests – blatantly worldy in vibe, a
beguiling safari through ethnological forgeries and far-fetched hybrids.
Afropop guitars are fed through postpunk flange; Wally Badarou synths quiver
and shimmy; gnarly fuzzed acid-guitar rears up against a skyline of minarets;
Hassell trumpet direct from Possible Worlds or “Houses In Motion” woozes
like smog draping itself over a tropical megacity. Now and then things
verge on full-of-Eastern-promise cheese: BICIKL’s “Penga” features
belly-dance percussion, gong-crashes, scimitar-flashing Arabian guitar. But
mostly the cosmopolitanism is scrambled, the sonic cartography suggestive of
magic-realist extensions to the map rather than actual existing
countries. Sometimes the music suggest off-land strangeness: Los Siquicos
Litoraleños’s “Misterios del Amazonas,” all glassy tinkles and
bobbing splodges of keyboard, moves with the absurd-yet-effective underwater
gait of a manatee.
“Esoterik”, the second side, is less ethnodelic, more
abstract. Tracks by Vacuum Templi and Tacet Tacet Tacet recall the
amorphous grey zones of industrial’s ambient-leaning outfits, such as Zoviet
France. Other artists intersect with recent online-underground styles
like vaporwave, or that texturally splattery, event-crammed style of digital
experimental composition associated with labels like PAN. Electro Summer
Arcade’s “ラテックスキリスト” is beached yacht
rock, the hull corroded and pocked with holes. Jealousy Party’s “Polymorphic
stomp” describes itself perfectly: Deleuze & Guattari’s
body-without-organs trying to shake its floppy ‘n’ oozing stuff on a crowded
dancefloor. As the track devolves further, imagine a musique concrète jam session involving actually sticky
stuff - preserves, syrups, marmalade – as sound-sources.
Recently there’s been a discernible uptick of interest in
the Fourth World concept: from Optimo’s Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth
World 1983-2017) compilation, through labels such as Discrepant, to
music-sharing blogs with a penchant for the “neo geo” Japanese style of
Eighties exquisiteness that blurred the borders between ambient, new age and
exotica (think Midori Takada). Indeed “nat-geo 3.0” is another word
Artetetra deploy on their bandcamp page, but less as a nod to Sakamoto’s
neo-geo concept, they say, more as a play on National Geographic, the
periodical that brought the aliens already on this planet into
suburban homes and dentist waiting rooms across the West.
You could place Artetetra as the latest outcrop of a long,
discontinuous tradition. Most recently, there’s been Sublime Frequencies and
hypnagogic tape explorers like Spencer Clark, Sun Araw, and Lieven Martens
Moana. Before that, the Nineties techno-travelogue school of Loop Guru and
David Toop. The Eighties, decade of the world music boom, teemed with
tourism: Holger Czukay, Malcolm Mclaren, Aksak Maboul, Byrne/Eno, Lizzy
Mercier Descloux, to name just a handful. But even in the Seventies you had
Joni Mitchell sampling a Burundi beat on Hissing’s “The Jungle Line,”
ethno-tinged side-projects by progressive musicians like Steve Winwood, not
forgetting Ginger Baker’s godawful Africa 70. Artetetra acknowledge many
of these predecessors but point to the original exotica of Les Baxter and
Arthur Lyman as a deeper affinity.
Exoticism – or to phrase it less problematically, an
openness to sounds, instruments, and rhythmss from outside Western pop and
unpop traditions – seems to come in waves, linked most likely to lull phases
when renewal through external influx seems necessary or alluring. You could
easily critique these practices as a hipster version of globalization: an End
of Geography to match an alleged End of History, in which xenomania joins
forces with retromania in a desperate ransacking drive to fill up our
voids with the reinvigorating riches of other cultures, other eras.
But in the disorienting new context of a world that’s furiously reterritorializing
itself – I write as Le Pen and Macron face off to determine the future of
Europe - the light-hearted cosmopolitanism and Other-directed curiosity that
characterise Artetetra and their kindred spirits starts to seem not only valid,
but valorous.
