ALBUM REVIEW: Bye Bye Tsunami – Bye Bye Tsunami

If you want something really weird to mess with your perception of music, BYE BYE TSUNAMI present the most outrageously bizarre record you’ll hear this year. And to be clear, it’s January. The Copenhagen-based trio look to incorporate their noise-jazz/experimental style into a self-titled record that seems to thrive on disfunction and messing with what even counts as music at all.

A track like Reb Bible might please people who enjoy the frantic style of jazz that pushes into the completely unconventional and experimental. There’s genuinely something behind it all that might tick some boxes. It is pretty mental, and doesn’t expect you to connect emotionally, but to consider it in disbelief. Whether that disbelief is either or either positive or negative in nature honestly doesn’t seem to matter to BYE BYE TSUNAMI.

Things get pretty dark and surreal on the self-titled track Bye Bye Tsunami. It brims with odd timings, incredibly avant-garde jazz and grating vocals which make way to simmer into the quiet, digital nonsense of its tail end. You can find corners of the art world where these kinds of noise and soundscapes would fit perfectly without even giving a second thought. However, this is the most niche sounding record on the scene for sure, and won’t be for a majority. The overwhelming positions of depravity in Holdin’ Banana Spiders Through The Folds Of Time/Space is something else entirely to what might regularly count as music. Most will find this an affront to taste and composition, and it won’t click in any way. But for those who enjoy the depravity of equally off kilter acts like CLOWN CORE, then this will maybe find its audience.

It’s hard to find a point of commentary on this record, because its point is to be jarring, to be mindlessly aggravating, in order to perhaps spark some reaction in you as a listener. By that count, it’s done its job to massive effect, and if you’ve a mind to wade into the utter nonsense of it all, then there are smatterings of genuine musicianship in there under layers of frenetic, synthetic textures.

Proteo is the least jarring tune on here for sure, with the addition of some maddening, geese-scream flaubosax- an instrument of Lorenzo Colocci’s own making. Its clanger-esque pipping and popping goes by while the flute merrily bobs along, barely aware of the rising tempo or the frantic pulse of Søren Høi’s drums and Uldis Vitols‘ bass beneath. That is until the last few seconds, wherein some tiny moment of almost cohesion, (or what counts for it in noise-jazz) is reached and is by comparison pretty rewarding to get to.

The most interesting listening experience might be J-Pop Love Banana Murder, which sounds like a tape at a Japanese arcade is being chewed on by some flute loving cosmic demon. It’s crackled and surreal, electronic and broken and incomprehensible. If you have managed to last to that point in the record, you might be so blindsided by the insanity of the whole thing to enjoy it. Or you might think BYE BYE TSUNAMI are posturing at making music, but that it is nothing of the sort. Or you might find it completely entertaining and ludicrous and feel nothing for it at all but humour.

BYE BYE TSUNAMI aren’t going to convince the masses with this record, and they seem not to be interested in fulfilling anyone’s ideas of what music is at all. Obviously, they are content with what they’re making, and that’s sort of the point in many ways. From an exterior viewpoint, this is a most bizarre noise-jazz record that makes anything that comes after it feel middling.

Rating: 5/10

Bye Bye Tsunami is set for release on January 28th via Nefarious Industries.

Follow BYE BYE TSUNAMI on Bandcamp.