What if the Krautrock era never came to an end? If all the impetuous experimentation in the heart of Europe circa ’73 hadn’t been swallowed up by the transatlantic pop juggernaut of the majors? If the hippies had won? We will never know. Anyway, the guys from Takeshi’s Cashew have experienced this parallel dimension and still dared the transit into ours, with them: a golden sound document called »Humans In A Pool«. Drawn by promises of a better world, the debut album of the young sextet bubbles over with wild expressivity, marries cultures, transcends tradition and genre. It sounds so playful, so detached, what is conveyed in songs of the immense vitality and beauty of a »Sarajevo« or »Pink Glass« – but it is not. When music gives this impression, it has sometimes already taken the step from dilettantism to a work of art without flaunting it. Recorded in a small DIY home studio, the Viennese project skips umpteen levels of artistic development during this process, reflecting the essence of world music, club culture and psychedelia in a prism of global influences – here the heroic exuberance of a Western score by Franco Micalizzi, through the Ash Ra temple, flowing with euphoric rhythms and reminiscences of cosmic music, Afrobeat, Cumbia, Latin Funk, Tishoumaren, Tribal Ambient and delirious folk from the Far East. So it doesn’t take more than a good 43 minutes to make this amalgam glow and vibrate. Takeshi’s Cashew show how it’s done and celebrate the chaos of our time as the beginning of a transition, as the bottom before the ride to the top, where yesterday is spied without regret. Not the pains of this life, but its exuberance and wild abundance eventually bring us close to tears as we remember them.
Maria Somerville
Luster
4AD