The environment teems naturally, birds chirp, a breeze gently fleets, the lake splashes and bees pan across the stereo field, humming in and out. It’s a wonderfully real experience, and if you have a penchant for self-reflection, this could well take you places.
Kuku! is not music… at least not in its conventional sense. What’s heard is a piece of foley art, the recording of a lake during summer morning in a national park, Estonia. The recording itself is great. The environment teems naturally, birds chirp, a breeze gently fleets, the lake splashes and bees pan across the stereo field, humming in and out. It’s a wonderfully real experience, and if you have a penchant for self-reflection, this could well take you places.
That notion of bringing your own experience to Kuku! is not unlike John Cage’s 4’33”, were Cage focused on eliminating all sound for 4 minutes and 33 seconds—instead he was thrilled to hear the sound of his pulse thumping and nerves whizzing. I’m thinking about past summer travels while drafting this review, and they are warm pleasant reflections, perhaps amplified by the serenity of the recording. Richard Allen’s review discusses the record in terms of sound design, where the smaller birds chirping are backing vocalists to a main character and so on. It’s a wonderful interpretation, otherwise unrealized to this critic.
Yet, this is not strictly music and one should be clear to state that Kuku! would be a record only met halfway, even by audiophiles, if it shipped as an ambient piece alone. Instead, it ships as a breathtakingly detailed CD package. What designer Okeiko and composer Taavi Tulev have created in their package design is an extension of the ambient work on Kuku! As the design is so incredibly detailed (and do view the image inserted on this page), its visual ideas are forced upon the listener, who visualizes the images supplied by the art while listening to the environmental backdrop of the audio. It’s a technically impressive accomplishment.
Tulev is picking up awards for this too—winning silver prize in the Estonian Design Awards earlier in 2014. It is an extraordinarily detailed and beautiful package which accompanies the transparent disc inside. The disc has artist Okeiko’s doodles on it, and you’re even encouraged to re-arrange the front panel of art yourself, being supplied with a range of suitable stickers to attach. This focus on creation is the opposite to Tulev’s previous record, T400, where the emphasis was on destruction (you had to smash the glass that the CD was contained in to get it.)
Kuku! would not be near as exciting or interesting without its art-cum-package design to accompany it. It’s a well-recorded piece of foley artistry which sounds wholly authentic. Yet without Okieko’s and Tulev’s design, it would be a very incidental piece of work, perhaps fitting best in a museum, or art gallery as background audio for spectators to get a feel for a natural environment. What Kuku‘s package does successfully, is marry a visual reality of its recording, imposing a strong picture into our imagination for an ambiance to live in.
Kuku! is available on Bandcamp.
