Laying on a hammock, peering into a brightly lit canopy, Mpala Garoo's Ivan Karib transmits dazed elation from Moscow, bringing warmth to even the most bitter summer climates. His newly reissued debut Ou Du Monde is brimming with escapist textures that brush and click like the soil they were meant to reflect upon. It's idealist tropicalia down to sensory characteristics, and crosses paths with its Hawaiian and African references more often that it does Mpala Garoo's colleagues in his experimental music vernacular.
Out of the cavern harboring Karib's sparsely cast atmospheres in the duo Kon Tiki Gemini, he traces Ou Du Monde with the shadow patterns of palm leaves shone on balmily lit sand. Clusters of percussion and placidly delayed guitar encircle "Open Way Up High", ascending and blossoming, throbbing as they pinch themselves closed. Its inverses, the lounging "Kid Island" and its kin "Primiriirii", are syrupy themes for bamboo-built resorts, dripping with resplendent melodies. Though these feel like old-world equatorial numbers, they bounce and clang with playful percussion arranged with the microcosmic sensitivity of a found-sound gatherer.
Karib inquires this forte more attentively on the second side, which effloresces as its sizzling tonalities are awash. The oceanic centerpiece "Vive L'immensite" froths and coasts without rising to an expected tidal apex, rather moving in ripples. The surface bubbles on "Fatu Hiva Feeling", a bustling festival of swirling, opulent hand percussion, which liquefies into the slushy electronic kicks of the homeward cruise "Invisible Dolphins". Ou Du Monde doesn't simply radiate, but it also dives in, explores, and happens upon a trove of foreign wonder. It's transportation music that comes with an appetite for further voyage.
[Mpala Garoo Facebook]
[Stream/Buy Ou Du Monde from Aguirre Records]
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