PING PONG SELF TITLED
Rome-based imprint Raw Culture isn’t exactly renowned for its conservatism but the astonishing new album from Italian duo Andrea Renzini and Stephano Passini pushes the boat so far out it disappears over the horizon and gets crushed to matchwood by an alien species of squid. Lashed together from field recordings of Korean table tennis matches and a bijouterie of bizarre instrumentation (filter bag, aerosol flute, yoga balls), ‘Ping Pong’ is a riot of gnarly free jazz and motorik machine funk that charges, battering ram in hand, at the portal to a future of infinite possibility. The four pressurised jams that comprise the album’s A side (‘Master Ping’) showcase the band at its most organic and untamed. Cacophonous drum cannonades delineate a sequence of volatile grooves made all the more unstable by the miasma of caterwauling sonic detritus through which they corkscrew. It’s an outlandishly heady concoction, but the flip (‘Master Pong’, natch) is where Ping Pong’s singular vision comes fully into focus. Homing in on an irresistible sour spot ‘twixt Föllakzoid’s virulent technoid krautrock and the clammy sleaze-disco shenanigans of Decius, tracks like ‘Zilch’ and the jaw-dropping ‘Welcome’ are crammed with spadefuls of such dizzying detail they could trigger synaesthesia in a breeze block. Despite closing out with ‘Future’, a garish synth-punk hoedown that sticks out like a pilchard in a blancmange, there’s a pervasive sense here that Ping Pong are hovering on the cusp of a giant evolutionary leap; a metamorphosis into some higher, deeper and more vaporous form even they can’t conceive of. For now though, this is more than sufficient. Keep watching the skies.
GonzoKaraoke 