THE POTENT, experimental sonic meeting of minds that is Fhunyue Gao and Sven Kacirek came about quite by chance, and with a first single and video from that meeting, “Bowie”, being released today, those of us who enjoy our music nuanced and leftfield and odd can be thankful for the serendipitous.
Fhunyue, who has previously worked with Bongo Joe’s Swiss electrofunk outfit L’eclair, a stage director and performer and Sven, himself not averse to a musical catholicism after his work with in the downtempo duo Field, the future jazz of Honolulu Playboys, the Afro-glitch textures of ODD OKODDO, alongside collaborations with Shabaka Hutchings, Marc Ribot, John McEntire, Hauschka and Nils Frahm, first met while working for a contemporary dance project in the Dutch city of Tilburg.
Making and exploring music together was a necessary pressure valve from their dance work, in which their talents were subducted to the primary needs of that project; and their January album, Hoya, from which this first single is taken, arose from that.
Their off-the-clock sessions saw them investigating a host of instrumental textures and the discrete roles and moods they offered; these included the marimba, drums and other percussive tools, electronics, the theremin, the Buchla modular synthesizer and the piano. A formal collaboration now seemingly essential the pair sojourned to Sven’s studio in Hamburg.
And “Bowie”? If you’ve loved recent work by Masayoshi Fujita and John Thayer, textural ambience that has a foot firmly in both the electronic and the organic instrumentational camps, then this will so be up your strasse; humming, evocative theremin, marimba, tones shifting slowly as if offshore currents; a gentle, Tortoise-like breakbeat which leads you inside so you can peer back at the world through the instruments. It has a precise imprecision, if you like; a flow that you should bend to.
The song comes supplemented with a video by Annalena Fröhlich that focuses on the world collapsing, the arresting incursion of memory, trapped inside a laptop.
Fhunyue Gao & Sven Kacirek’s Hoya will be released digitally and on vinyl by Altin Village & Mine on January 21st. For digital, please step this way; for wax, over here.
