A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads us inside an ancestral tunnel, layered like a bazaar, for just 21 minutes.
At the stroke of the 18th minute the light goes off and comes on intermittently marked by the rhythm of Bingo Bongo.
From the darkness crawls an ignoble spirit with stocky features with a guttural voice leads us astray to the gates of the gulf.
The air suddenly becomes warm, the current dilates.
The internal whistle of the bowels resounds from the deepest abysses
The shadow of his pain vanishes in the wake of a final sound sedimentation.
That’s the description, half narrative and half composition of place, for the new album Bijù Bazar by Jugodefatuo, a pseudonym of the Italian sculptor and musician Claudio Fedele. The six tracks which stretch out for just over 36 minutes arrive on Discrepant’s cassette imprint Sucata Tapes, which offers another summary depiction of the record, writing that ‘Ancient Italian Ghosts step into the sugar Bijú Bazar, layers of ancestral flow prompted by Folklore and Tradition: the Inner Whistle of Sub Tropical Realism’.
Those snippets are suitably suggestive, for Bijù Bazar sounds like some hallowed yet ghastly ritual, an ode to lands and times and a kindred people that our collective memory having cast aside soon forgot. Perhaps it was better left that way, but what Jugodefatuo summons up on Bijù Bazar sticks in the memory, one of the most beguiling and intoxicating and altogether strange records I’ve heard this year.
Blending electronics and field recordings with submerged instrumentation and passages of rasping, shamanistic or even fiendish voice, at times the record seems to both swallow up and conjure brass bands, Andean pan flute, the conch shell trumpets of the Pacific islands and gamelan ensembles while snatches of field recordings evoke tropical birds and cauldrons of bats in dank caves. Through loping communal rhythms and more menacing ambiances, the other comparison which springs to mind is of the demonic circus master Papa Lazarou who tormented the denizens of Royston Vasey in the BBC Two series The League of Gentleman wearing a top hat while apparently daubed in blackface.
