Well, it’s not his long-awaited “pop” album, that’s for sure. It’s far
more interesting than that. ‘Out Of Nowhere’ is a great record – possibly
better even than that – and it marks out Jimi Tenor as a serious composer, seriously
dislocated from just about everything else that’s going on. To say
he’s ploughing his own furrow is to vastly underestimate his agricultural ambitions.
Jimi’s in a field of his own, but just what is that he’s growing?
Those familiar with his Jimi’s two previous Warp albums, 1997’s ‘Intervision’
and 1999’s ‘Organism’, will be acquainted with his soundtrack-y tendencies and
lascivious way with a lyric. But though these elements persist, Jimi’s
scope is now broader than Broadway and wider than Panavision. Every piece
of music on ‘Out Of Nowhere’ sounds like it could be taken from the best scene
in a fine, fine movie. Sometimes it’s an ambush in a Western dry gulch;
sometimes a rain-soaked futuristic sci-fi metropolis; sometimes cars passing
on a noir-ish unlit lonely highway. And sometimes all in the same song.
One thing’s for sure, ‘Out Of Nowhere’ has been a massive labour of love on
the part of everyone involved. For a start, it’s Jimi’s first orchestral
record, and was recorded with the Orchestra of the Grand Theatre Lodz in Poland.
This decision was partly taken for financial reasons (orchestras are cheaper
in the East), and partly because the bloke in Paris who was supposed to score
the album had recommended them. When he turned out to be a waster, Jimi
found himself locked in a bare Polish room frantically writing the scores for
the 60 people waiting next door, while he tried to remember the range of each
of their instruments and forget that he’d never done this before.
One way he got through was by imagining very tightly storyboarded scenes, complete
with camera movements, for each section of a song. So ‘Night In Loimaa’
opens with a shot of a Mafia boss and his obligatory ho’s in a penthouse hot-tub,
which pulls back to reveal a ringing phone and, as the opening credits begin
to roll, the tempo changes and the scene cuts to the street outside. Conceptually
it all works beautifully until Jimi tells you that Loimaa is in fact some one-moose
town in back-of-beyond Finland.
Working with the orchestra placed certain restrictions on Jimi and he had to
“reduce the funk” and write more straightforward rhythms than usual*.
As a result Jimi has been driven to new forms of invention, and ‘Out Of Nowhere’
is anything but restricted. ‘Blood On Borscht’ sounds like Carl Orff’s
Carmina Burana’ covered by a heavy metal band with a cast of a 1,000 slave extras...on
the Planet of the Apes. In other words: terrifying. Actually, its
huge slabs of communistic sound are inspired by ‘Solaris’ (Russian film director
Andrei Tarkovsky’s cosmonaut answer to ‘2001’) and its OST composer, Eduard
Artemives.
Opener and title track, ‘Out Of Nowhere’, marries the high drama of Lalo Schifrin
(of ‘Jaws’ fame) to music reminiscent of a scene of alien abduction somewhere
in Nevada. Elsewhere, Jimi has Baluji Shrivastav, his blind sitar player,
tune his instrument to the Chinese scale to approximate a “Hollywood idea” of
Oriental music. Yes, that bizarre. As well as the orchestra and
sitars, ‘Out Of Nowhere’ plays host to the Pro Cantor Choir from Lahti in Finland,
who also graced ‘Organism’, plus an international cast of American, British
and Japanese talent, including Jimi’s new bride Nicole Willis, who sings lead
vocals on closing track ‘Call Of The Wild’.
At the heart of all this wild invention sits a cast-iron, copper-bottomed Jimi
Tenor funk classic entitled ‘Hypnotic Drugstore’, which starts with a tabla
offbeat and dizzying flutes, before embarking on a lyric about “sleeping eyes
wide open” and receiving calls “from the 5th dimension, or whatever”.
Hmmm? The 5th dimension? That might account for it.
WARP / SATÉLITE K. Grassot 13. 08025 Barcelona. Tel.: 93 4579745
Fax: 93 4590370
Promo: Natalia de Jesús & Carles Baena
promo@mundivia.es www.kindustria.com