Yayoba

Yayoba

Matkat

Not Not Fun

The latest by international psycho-acoustic guild Yayoba takes its title from the Finnish word for ‘journeys’ or ‘trips,’ evoking both the music’s questing spirit and its cosmic, lysergic ethos: Matkat. The album’s 14 tracks span the gamut of the group’s surrealist world-building: lunar mycological seances, metallic woodwind silhouettes, pointillist plasmatic soups, ethnographic sci-fi soundtracking, spore-harvesting reveries, deep space starbirths. Despite the omnivorous palette, the songs share a certain a smelted, bioluminescent quality, stewed in and sifted from a collective vat of molten alien ore. Long-distance chemistry is a gift not a given but Yayoba’s triumvirate – Paul Wilson, Jani Hirvonen, and Johannes Schebler – have each logged a lifetime in shape-shifting outskirts of the experimental underground, and their affinity is audible. Matkat unfolds like a dizzying swap-meet of gene-spliced electronics, stalagmite drip, asteroid dust, and black market fungus, molded at a forge of circuits and glass, then cast into the cloud to gleam and confound.

Yayoba

A Maze Of Glass

Not Not Fun

4th-world fusion trio Yayoba triangulate warped constellations of electronics, woodwinds, hand percussion, and field recordings via their respective bases in Brighton (UK), Turku (FIN), and Wiesbaden (DE), coaxing a sound they describe as “like a beam of light passing through translucent glass walls in a labyrinth.” Comprised of legacy experimentalists Paul Wilson (F. Ampism), Jani Hirvonen (Uton), and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin) – the latter two of whom also moonlight in “crypto-botanical” electro-acoustic unit Grykë Pyje – the group operate spontaneously and post-geographically, file-sharing sketches, textures, and FX until an alien synergy takes hold. A Maze Of Glass collects 16 of the project’s headiest and most hyper-sensory improvisations into a 47-minute microcosmic odyssey of fractal, radiophonic exotica. Circuit-bent devotionals dovetail into pixelated mists; diaphanous lifeforms lurch through psychoactive caverns; cybernetic miasmas dance and dissipate. It’s music both placeless and perplexing, undulating and uncanny, hieroglyphic transmissions echoing from the depths.