Jivaro
Jivarodelia
Kindercore / Electronic Watusi Boogaloo
Jivaro is a guy named Henrik Dahl. He’s part of the increasingly-hyped Ultra Wide Band music posse from Sweden, and he’s also a member of the weird bicontinental dance group Sleeping Flies, which also features The Bill Doss of The Sunshine Fix. This means he’s super-cool.
Further proof of super-coolness: Jivaro makes music that sounds like it was made by a guy who doesn’t really care that much about music. And although what he does is just basically techno, or what my brother calls “robot music,” it’s super-cool that he’s interested in ambient music and dub and The Byrds. (I got that from the bio, not from the album itself.)
Every song is basically just a few low-key elements repeated, mixed and matched, pumped up in the mixed then dropped out, for six or eight or five minutes. This is also super-cool, in case you didn’t know – only uncool people insist on such unfashionable elements as “passion” and “surprise” anymore.
The tracks on Jivarodelia are repetitive and don’t have much heart, but many of them sound almost funky at times, so they’re okay. There’s a seriously old-school breakdancing-music vibe to “Electro-funk,” and “Jivaro Dub” does in fact make use of dub-like rhythms, although in a very super-arti-ficial way. And yeah, okay, I dug “Galactic” a little. For a while.
But these songs are so darned repetitive and unambitious that I don’t know where you’d listen to them. Not driving – I tried that and I almost ran off the road. And not really dancing, either; just too lightweight. Aw, hell, I dunno. Not bad, exactly, but just being super-cool doesn’t necessarily mean you can make a good album, either.
