Hometown: London/Bahrain.
The lineup: Kamal Rasool, Charles Prest, Sam Rowe, Karthik Poduval and Craig Doporto.
The background: Hyperborea, the new album by Flamingods, sounds like a compilation of snippets of music from countries far and wide, but mainly Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Only you can’t quite place the sources of the fragments or “samples”, giving an already exotic sound an extra-otherworldly aura. How could we have missed this group? They’re quite something. They began a few years back as a bedroom project started by Kamal Rasool, and now he’s got four friends on board, though they’re about as far from the band-as-gang template as you can get. They were never once in a room together for the entire recording of the album; instead, audio files were emailed back and forth between the five players.
We say “players”. Actually, they admit they don’t conventionally play, for example, the Turkish qanun or any number of the percussion instruments picked up by Rasool on his travels to Tanzania and the Amazon; rather, as they told the Quietus, they hit and generally manhandle them until they get the required sound. Not that that means Hyperborea is a cacophony of atonalities and drones – far from it. It just sounds like a mosaic of lovely bits, “songs” suddenly ending or trailing off randomly. Imagine if the Avalanches pieced together their next album from snatches of field recordings of music from distant lands from non-specific points in the past. That’s what Hyperborea is like: tribal folkadelia, ancient jungle, or aboriginal prog. There are moments that are recognisably rhythmic, such as Market Dancer, but they are so unorthodox in structure and arrangement you could hardly play them in a club.
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The catalyst for the album was Rasool being forced out of the UK by new visa laws, forcing him to confront his feelings about identity and belonging (hence the longing for a new home, the mythical island of Hyperborea). The result of such thinking was five young men, all seasoned travellers, and in far-flung corners of the globe, transmitting their various experiences in a flurry of you've-got-to-hear-this. You might feel as though you're listening to them all at once, in real time. It’s literally sensational: a riot of sights and sounds. One minute you’re in the Garden of Indra, enjoying old oriental tones and timbres; the next you’re in Manyara, and what sounds like a bustling eighth-century metropolis. Lake Yaylaru, like a lot of the music on Hyperborea, seems to have come from a place – much like the setting for Game of Thrones – based in a fictional present that simultaneously resembles an ancient civilisation. And yet Hyperborea is not, for all that, hard work. In fact, it’s a pleasure; a heady, not heavy, one. But there’s a lot to take in. Prepare to be bombarded by bliss.
The buzz: “A record of superb scope, vision and energy” – Loud & Quiet
The truth: Out-of-this-world music.
Most likely to: Make you feel hyper.
Least likely to: Make you feel bored.
What to buy: Hyperborea is released on 28 July by Shape.
File next to: Goat, Avalanches, Japan, Ash Ra Tempel.
Links: flamingods.bandcamp.com
Ones to watch: Fickle Friends, Children, Danjasop, No Rome, We Are Shining.
