MY JAZZY CHILD

Sada Soul

CD, Clapping Music

Like a 21st-century folksinger Damien Mingus drifts dreamlike through a variety of songs, styles and compositions, mainly interested in rubbing various sounds and ideas onto each other and see what they’ll produce. The result is more than remarkable, a parade of freaky yet beautiful melodies, looped sounds, soft voices and choirs and more connotations and citations than flies on a dungheap. The references used to describe this record will reach into all decades of the second half of last century and maybe even some earlier ones. Like the forgotten backroom of the modern music history, this record is like opening a door and finding a small room full of old boxes and sacks, each of them containing something that was once worth keeping, nevertheless people have forgotten about it. Damien Mingus has sifted through it and sorted out the good stuff.

You just have to love a record on which the first song starts off like a psychedelic folk-song for children and finds its first highpoint in the words “you are a star / my dear / I rape you every night / in my dreams”. And the fairies and elves strum the guitars, bang the percussions softly and whistle along. Where will that end? Alice in Wonderland on crack? No, the start of this record concentrated in this fashion only hints at the true glam of “Sada Soul”.

Actually, the songs of Damien Mingus, are more about textures, about the connection of various atmospheres and layers and their interconnectivity. That is why ephemeral choirs will meet Seventies onomatopoeic but also very cheesy vocal groups and then again children’s voices. And that is only the vocal level, which leaves us with several more to explore. In this context, the roots of My Jazzy Child might be traced to Robert Wyatt and John Cale or any other of the great protagonists of free-form-songwriting of the Seventies, where everything was in flux, constantly changing and rearranging itself. Of course, Mingus (what’s in a name!?) also draws heavily from his history in electronic music, bringing noise-layers, ambient-soundscapes, loops and backtracking into the mix, to produce a definitely eclectic, eccentric but also ecstatic and encompassing album.

Within four songs – and this is definitely a collection of songs rather than your usuual collection of tracks by electronic artists – the listener has been driven from a funny, quirky folk-song to a harsh-noise-remix of Flying Saucer Attack called “Morfler”. In the sixth song, “Barcelona”, he sings over a vocal-carpet that sounds much like the experiments of La Monte Young in the Sixties. The last song combines low and soft ambient-noise or static-drones with field-recordings a child’s xylophone and low whisteling. Make of that what you will and try to imagine all the stuff that comes in-between.

Next to the electronic twitches the acoustic guitar seems to be the most prominent instrument on “Sada Soul”., including the electronic twitching of the acoustic guitar. This is one of the reasons this record sounds so folksy on the surface. Another one is the dreamlike, fazy voice of Damien Mingus, who sings for the first time on this record – all his other recordings being purely instrumental. Definitely a big step for someone, who is used to make music on his laptop, to step up in front of people and sing. Or at least in front of a microphone.

Together with the evasive percussions, the jazzy acoustic guitar filtered through a sampler and other digital effects addeed, all of it pieced together by an unflinching will to give everything a try at least once, you will experience an unique, almost bazaar-like mixing of ideas and styles. Or, who else would use a “slurping”-sound as a percussive element and sing like a manic prince-incorporation on valium over a minimal guitar-chord?

From time to time a record comes along which gives you the feeling, that you have just had a glimpse into the future, of what music in the next hundred years will bring. In a straight line from Inox Kapell to David Balula, if you can imagine that, David Mingus aka My Jazzy Child comes away as both more song-oriented and more melodic than both, though less hyper-cosmic and also less subconscious as both. Overall, “Sada Soul” is also a lesson in liberty, as in enjoying your freedom as well as taking your liberties, even if no-one really is holding them back.

www.clappingmusic.com

http://myjazzychild.free.fr

12/2003