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Alomoni 1985

Alomoni 1985

a review by gil gershman of
release format Alomoni 1985 by Karuna Khyal (CD Album)

text

1999 saw the unearthing of another coveted relic, thanks to the efforts of Paradigm Disc's Clive Graham. As with the label's reissues of (the possibly related) Brast Burn's Debon, Trevor Wishart's Menagerie, and The Reverend Dwight Frizzell & Anal Magic's Beyond the Black Crack, Karuna Khyal's Alomoni 1985 is something very special - unburied treasure, indeed. The MO on Alomoni 1985 is thoroughly corrupted rock & roll, steeped in ragtag R&B and crisscrossed by croaked vocal mantras and deliriously dizzy slide guitar. On the first of the albums two 20+-minute fractured tracks of rambunctious, bass-led "song," Alomoni 1985 invites comparisons to nothing less than a low-rent Faust Tapes - less dependent upon Faust's bucolic demeanor and rigorous studio-as-instrument directive - or a particularly gone Magic Band outtake (free from the Captain's authoritarian censorship). And while KK is at least more deserving of the "Japanese Faust" descriptive misleadingly bestowed upon Brast Burn, even this seems bluntly dismissive of a unique, remarkably potent brand of madness.

Liberally laced as it is with dated Canned Heat-isms, copious shofar-squawk harmonica riffing, grim oompah/cosmic jug-band plod, smears of visceral feedback, and truly insidious tape-work, Alomoni 1985 is most uncannily analogous to the early catalog of Hapshash & The Coloured Coat. An LSD-besotted English trio, H&TCC recorded one of the freakiest records of its day, 1967's giddy Hapshash & The Coloured Coat Featuring The Human Host and The Heavy Metal Kids. Rumor has Hapshash's lysergic excesses leading members to death, insanity, and, natch - production work for a major studio after only one other (very different) album, 1969's fun, Moby Grape-flavored Western Flier. H&tCC's legacy long outlived the band, as Hapshash's music and communal lifestyle directly inspired the first stirrings in Germany of what would become Krautrock.

Heaping complication upon confusion, the smoking second half of Alomoni 1985 winds through a noisy tribal exorcism-cum-hoedown. With a bacchanalian commotion of scrappy percussion, a dozen shades of vocal damage (overtone chants, wordless mumbling, tuneless singing, raucous whoops and hollers), gusts of modulated (wind? synth?) noise, and spurts of volatile, psychedelicized improv, KK bursts through the free-music barrier - albeit in a stomping, stumbling Cro-Magnon fashion. No-Neck Blues Band adherents take note. Surviving lore about KK, however, places Alomoni 1985 quite a few years earlier (maybe), in Japan (maybe), with an unknown (maybe), substantially more menacing quantity either cut adrift of its contemporaneous musical timeline or orbiting decades ahead of such. Or consider that such modern concerns as Ectogram, Ulan Bator, Ghost, and all aforementioned and kindred souls could sticker their names on the cover of Alomoni 1985 without anyone batting an eye. It just doesnt add up, does it?

In fact, so many questions concerning KK persist that the CD tray includes a plea (from Mr. Graham!) for any information about this enigmatic crew. Alomoni 1985 may lack the provenance needed to calibrate its actual historical import, but the album remains a compelling oddity - brash, bristling, baffling, and all but inexplicable. One is left wondering what might have become of Karuna Khyal, whatever year's model Alomoni 1985 represents. Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 17 Jan 2000