FUJAKO - Soul Buzz (Angström Records)

The international duo of Fujako returns to Angstrom Records with Soul Buzz, a short but intense six-track salvo of earth shaking, gritty electronic music featuring DC's Black Saturn. It is released on 12" and digital on August 26th.

Uniting over a love of echo, bass and space, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, from Portugal, and Nicolas Esterle, from Belgium via France, came together to form Fujako with a desire to make music of "unlooped hip hop and telluric dub from the geological strata." Exiling themselves to a remote mountainous area of central Portugal, Fujako re-emerged in 2009 with a debut album that crystallised their intent with a righteous sound and fury. Soul Buzz, recorded between Porto and Brussels, continues their lifelong dedication to sonic alchemy with thundering bass, cavernous spaces and beat up rhythms combining to speak a mighty dub into the listener's bones.

The gravelly voice of DC-based MC Black Saturn - grandson of blues musician John Jackson - brings the title track to life, literally and figuratively, as he takes to the opening bars to exclaim that "the soul is a noise like buzz". Fujako provide an apocalyptic backdrop of swung out beats, distorted melodies and bodily bass for Black Saturn to deliver acute social observations, self-referential truths and channel a spiritualism not unlike the mighty dub Gibson spoke of in Neuromancer thirty years ago. The dub version sends the original into an even more cavernous hole, deep beneath the surface of the earth where its reverberations are moulded into a new spatial whole, layering earthy qualities with the same digital fuzz that has become part of our daily lives.

Taking a more traditional approach, 'Preacher's echo' is a spacious yet gritty dub instrumental, details folded into the grooves, fragments of voices echoing into the layers of earth beneath us. If you listen closely enough you may find universes in the song's vast expanse. 'J*A*' concludes the EP, again split into vital halves of original and dub. On the former Black Saturn's voice is once more added to the mix, telling a tale of a cloud jogging deity that gives us titanium rhythms over a sparse, subtle and vast instrumental. The dub does what the dub should, deconstructing and recomposing, bathing the song into an earthy mix that leaves it polished with a rough and rugged layer.

With Soul Buzz Fujako continue to live up to their desire to summon a music with peculiar telluric qualities, a perfect fit for Black Saturn's self proclaimed forensic artistry. Dub and hip hop are the base materials of Fujako's sonic alchemy, the earth their working space and the ever encroaching virtual world a necessary combustible to make their ideas very real.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJ6cATg238