Brand?

As a music enthusiast, I have a tendency to become acquainted with musical artists. After I spent some time in the studio with world music-techno artists Conundrum, a Boston-based collective, they asked me to be their scribe as they were releasing their first mass-marketed CD. Intense listening was the prerequisite for crafting compelling liner notes for their trance-inducing aural creations.
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Introductory Liner Notes ― Conundrum

At all times. Let me repeat. At all times ― and in most places ― there is a vast musical underground at work. Populated by multi-talented music heads, backyard boy geniuses, and also by tinkerers and goofs, this subterranean or (depending on the nature the of sounds) extra-terranean groove sector grows up happily invisible and unselfconscious, feasting curiously on giant mouthfuls of music from all mediums, traditions, and illusory time periods. Then, at some opportune or inopportune moment, their sounds burst forth, lift up, jump the fence and tumble laughing from their scraggly back yard into the even lines of the town square. All of a sudden, they leap straight beyond the creator’s peer group, seeming to have sprung full-grown from the head of Athena.

Conundrum is made up of a pair of these subterranean music heads. And they just jumped the fence. Cyrus Sink and Bhakta Kali, unseen and unknown as they experimented in their Boston studio over the last three years, have been gotten good at using their own abilities as multi-instrumental players and today’s ever-available sampling and recording technology to craft some playfully serious world techno-grooves. One might compare their most recent self-produced CD to world techno artists like Loop Guru. However, where Guru use music from a variety of ethnic traditions to deepen and tribalize a hard-sheened dance rhythm, Conundrum’s eclecticism oozes out its pores in compositions covered in many more layers of earth. Having spread the seeds of electronic styles such as drum and bass, dub, and ambient into the same patch of earth as African percussion, Middle-eastern folk-chant, Indian vocalizing, and 60s-related notions of psychedelia, time-space confluence and shifting collage forms, Conundrum roots out a sound that is wholly organic in presentation. One might say that this 14 track offering has an enthusiastic, unstudied sophistication to it that makes the technology involved in its production sound as if it were something physical, something with a taste and a smell and a spiritual velocity.

On early tracks, such as “Buddha Blackout,” a tight, loose skittering drumbeat is preceded by a trickling in of out-of-phase jazz instrumentation and chant-style singing. When these sounds merge, and as the world-jazz bass starts to melt your innards and drive you forward, dub style echo-effects make the music sound as if it’s coming from somewhere in the astral plane ― simultaneously issuing from multiple distances, times and spaces. You’re walking through a dirt-floored Turkish bazaar. Suddenly, you’re stuffed in a sack and dumped out into a field on the outskirts of the city 500 years later, unexplained. Could we call it organic techno-collage?

A description of every track on a CD that explores so many moods is really less essential than the actual experience of listening to it. Break down the components later. There’s plenty of time to think about how a groove sounds when a shenai gets used as if it were Augustus Pablo’s melodica ― and how that sound can possibly combine with a distorted trumpet. For now, just slip in the disc, open your head (’cause, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is head music, folks), and get ready to leave your body without leaving your body?if you know what I mean.

Steve Boni
December 2001
Somerville, Massachusetts