It’s a jungle inside Animala Corolla, constantly chattering birds and braying beasts with whom the duo sing (not necessarily in key), chant nonsense—or can they talk with the animals?—and grab at anything they can beat on while monkeying around with Jew’s harp, bubbly electronics, accordions, violins, kazoos, often for a very long time.
[Release page] Hitoshi Kojo and Carole Zweifel (now also Kojo) formed Jüppala Kääpiö in 2006 and after wandering together from Switzerland to Canada, Mongolia and Japan, they finally settled in Brussels, and began pursuing their vision of a “cosmopolitan folklore music.” The duo believes that living in an “aggressive” urban environment, our ears have lost their sensitivity to the “incredibly musical” natural world around us. In saying so, they are putting a twist on what Luigi Russolo, the Italian futurist, stated almost exactly one hundred years ago in his manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), which reminded us that the countryside to which modern man flees to escape the clamour of the newly-mechanized city is in fact anything but peace and quiet. It’s just a different kind of racket which unfortunately “fails to arouse any emotion” in the desensitized urban dweller.
In their ambition to increase our consciousness to animal species and plant life by recreation and reinterpretation, the duo goes beyond ecology and multiculturalism to a kind of pluralist, genus egalatarianism that even embraces minerals. Jüppala Kääpiö have a strong affinity with the mild-mannered but freaky folk of Finland, to the point of creating a “Finnish” name for themselves. It’s a jungle inside Animala Corolla, constantly chattering birds and braying beasts with whom the duo sing (not necessarily in key), chant nonsense—or can they talk with the animals?—and grab at anything they can beat on while monkeying around with Jew’s harp, bubbly electronics, accordions, violins, kazoos, often for a very long time. It’s seriously silly music, rampantly organic, downright rococo at times, free-form and a little haphazard. It may waft like dandelion seeds on “Blooming Cocoons,” but like nature itself, its seeming randomness is its own organizing principle and it comes to dignified, lazy fruition as it closes with “Saturatus.”
Comes literally wrapped in a warm fuzzy. It says here Animala Corolla was recorded in Vevey, Switzerland, but it sounds like some fantastical botanical garden dreamt up by Dr. Seuss.
Animala Corolla is available on Omnimomento. [Release page]
