‘This Czech quartet (Jara Tarnovski, Ondrej Jezek, Tomas Knoflicek, and Tomas Prochazka) takes a lot of influence from some of my favorite Japanese ambient and dream-pop artists, and they acknowledge as much by including these artists in their music. On their 2010 self-titled debut, they featured vocals by Moskitoo, Sawako, and Rurakiss. Their second record is Kon B, released by the Japan/England-based label Home Normal and which features guests vocals from Cokiyu, Cuushe, Miko, and “Japanese language supervision” from Aus. Gurun Gurun echoes the atmosphere of these artists’ music without imitating their sound. In fact it’s even more complex, the entire list of “instrumentation” running as follows: electric & acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, diddley bow, bass guitar, keyboards, pivofon, glockenspiel, kalimba, piano, flutes, fx, noises, sampling, field recordings, strings, kantele, vibraphone, turntables, radio, drums, percussion, time axis manipulator, theremin, harmonica, programming & editing, VLF, harmonium, back vocals, alto & tenor viola da gamba. At any given moment there can be half a dozen layers of sounds that somehow avoid feeling cluttered. It is simultaneously extremely chaotic as well as very measured, calm, and steady, definitely has more of a classical sensibility than anything else. Imagine if John Cage and Jonny Greenwood were to do a collaboration and that might give you an idea of the sound world contained on this album.’
germansingergirl
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
areudirty
