Sqaramouche have fused Jazz and Latin’s primal feel with the dark, oppressive atmosphere of contemporary self-conscious electronica—the jungle and the city collide, and it makes a surprisingly good noise.
“Enjoy the melody”—Berlin based record label nonine’s sign off to a PR email that I was forwarded. Ironic really, considering that Sqaramouche‘s new release, Belly Love, contained within said email, is largely an experiment in percussion; the three tracks—“Belly Love pt 1,” “Belly Love pt 2,” “Belly Love pt 3”—which constitute the release, build up, take apart, modify, then re-build various rhythmic edifices.
Over this ever-shifting backdrop a menagerie of weird and wonderful loops sporadically fade in and out. However rather than performing a conventional melodic function, a process dependent upon progression as well as repetition, most of these loops, which usually last only one or two bars and which are often rhythmically complex, add more to the tracks’ beats than anything else—even in those places where conventional drums are absent, loops are used to perpetuate the rhythm.
To make the thing listenable, there are of course longer patterns—bass lines, chord progressions, struck bells, even an iridescent splash of saxophone (courtesy of Helmut Neugebauer)—but these always appear as flavourings rather than important structural devices: the EP’s essence lies in its rhythmic pulsations more than anything else; a series of dark, twisted sambas (there’s even an electronic whistle).
Sqaramouche have fused Jazz and Latin’s primal feel with the dark, oppressive atmosphere of contemporary self-conscious electronica—the jungle and the city collide, and it makes a surprisingly good noise.
Belly Love pt. 1-3 is available on nonine.
