Moon Relay:
IMI
Hubro
Moon Relay isn't so much an outlier in Hubro's roster so much as emblematic of its genre-transcending approach and refusal to be pigeonholed. There's room for jazz, folk, rock, experimental, and pretty much everything else in the Norwegian label's universe, and perhaps no band better illustrates the idea than the two-guitars-bass-and-drums project Daniel Meyer Grønvold, Håvard Volden, Ola Høyer, and Christian Næss have collaborated on since the group's 2012 formation. Preceded by their 2013 mini-album debut and 2016's Full Stop Etc (both also on Hubro), IMI finds the Oslo-based quartet advancing beyond a collage-oriented approach to a style that's still resolutely experimental yet also rooted in tight, small-unit riffing and intense, precision-fueled beats.
Identified by unpronounceable track titles (“#`´`´`´/” representative), six original compositions appear, many of which play like some modern-day fusion of No Wave, post-punk, electro, and mutant techno, the band referencing in doing so an era when bands like Golden Palominos, Arto Lindsay's DNA, and others stoked cranial fire as part of NYC's downtown scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; there are even moments that suggest a distant connection to a nascent hip-hop pioneer like Afrika Bambaataa.
The second track on IMI could almost pass for an early, vocal-less Devo workout before the group's rough edges got smoothed over, and there are occasions where the tight, machine-like grooves aren't light years removed from the kinetic ones stoked by Elektro Guzzi. The experimental edge that's so much a part of Moon Relay's sound is also well-accounted for in snatches of tape-sourced noises that filter into the arrangements (a choir's woozy, slowed-down intonations among them), said gestures reflecting the possible influence of figures such as Stockhausen and Holger Czukay. Moon Relay is no nostalgia act, however: all such ground provides fertile soil for the group to build upon.
The album comprises thirty-seven minutes of machine beats, scabrous guitar noise, and avant-funk grooves that burst with energy, though not so much that the music veers out of control and degenerates into arhythmic sprawl. That double-axe frontline ensures there'll always be plenty of stabbing, caterwauling action in play, which makes the unwavering motorik foundation laid down by bassist Høyer and drummer Næss all the more crucial. To their credit, the four change things up by slowing the pace for the fourth track, though even here things eventually take a turn when atonal guitar stabs and shards scatter across the rhythm section's midtempo pulse. Track differences notwithstanding, IMI might generally be regarded as documenting a heady, time-accelerated intersection where avant-garde experimentalism, off-kilter funk, and punchy krautrock grooves collide.December 2018