Lauri Hyvärinen & Jukka Kääriäinen get into a very tangled electric guitar argument on Pulled Apart By Horses (BOKASHI RECORDS bokashi_001), each getting in each other’s way; as the accusations fly thick and heavy and fisticuffs are only a heartbeat away, much musical excitement trundles down the waterways into our hungry bellies.
After that opening burst of energy – I’m thinking now of ‘Vibe Shamans’ – the album slows down somewhat and enters a more tepid zone, one full of alien offshoots and conflicting signals from the artificial gravity unit. In this cooler environment, their wayward and unnatural guitar lines grow more confusing and convoluted, and we can see more clearly the eccentric lines of thought that have led to these unusual and speculative utterances. I’d imagine this is how most civilians perceive The Magic Band on first hearing, but the Helsinki players have that shade more violence in their Fenders, and zero discernible blues or free jazz leanings (or any prior influences, come to that).
Both these Finns loom large in the Helsinki improvised music realms, but I think this is the first time they’ve played as a duo. We’ve enjoyed Lauri Hyvärinen’s insane guitar work first through the Russian tape label SpinaRec, and then his solo releases like Trukki. There’s also the Horst Quartet, who took a more “open” approach to robbing the bank of good hope. Jukka Kääriäinen, not heard him so much, apart from that chestnuts-in-front-of-the-fire Christmas all-acoustic record from 2018 with Teppo Hauta-aho. Did I mention they’re also using effects pedals, or some mischief to disrupt the normal signal from their amps? You can hear some of this knob-twiddling malarkey fairly clearly on ‘Too Academic’, and it’s likely to cure anaemia by getting the blood to change from a liquid into a soft semi-solid mass.
Perplexing cover image; are we expected to read the double yellow lines as a metaphor for duo playing? Is the crack in the road significant? Has modern music run into a brick wall? (18/09/2024)