| Say whoa Goa >>
Repetition and mayhem according
by BOSS SAMBOSA “Recording this album has been a strange process,” says Goa (formerly Goa Gajah) main-man Monstre. He means it. Monstre is one of a new breed of electronically equipped musicians, a mix of gearhead and madman, who likes everything to be as raw, discombobulated and mangled as possible. “This recording has taken one full year and for a long time I’ve just been mixing it, cutting it. I bounced some tracks to four-track then bounced them back. I fucked with my vocals so many times. I hate sequencing and programming, so it’s all played live,” he says. On stage, Goa is all energy. Monstre fronts the group with his “screaming baby vocals,” which he pumps into a sampler, then sends back out in random snippets of jive/child speak. Two synth players (Jrobot and Alex Moskov) and two drummers (Will Glass and Alex Macsween) play hectic/melodic pulsing rhythms behind him. The result is repetitious mayhem, a hypnotic mess. Kind of like Can when Damo Suzuki was doing vocals. “Can meets the Boredoms is what someone put on our poster once,” says Monstre. “When I first saw the Boredoms at Lollapalooza, that’s when I decided never to sing normally again. It was amazing, two drummers, two vocalists going crazy, all this electronic noise everywhere.” But why the name, with its obvious crappy-trance dance connotations? “The first name of this band was Goa Gajah, which is a small Grotto in Bali. It’s this super-impressive temple outside, carved in stone, but inside it’s just a tiny cave. Our music is mayhem, very loud and crazy, but it’s all just one tiny rhythm. After a while, I felt bad about using this cultural name, so we just became Goa,” he says. “‘Trance’ is such a wicked word. It doesn’t mean crappy, repetitious Roland synths, it’s something that’s been with the human race forever. So if dance people come to our shows accidentally, it’s a good thing. They might see something different.” Goa’s thing is repetition—not loops, but simple, manual repetition studded with spontaneous injections. Monstre admits that this comes from his fascination with Indonesian music. “The Gamelan music was amazing, these concerts with everyone repeating the same thing for six hours. I felt this was the music for me.” He goes on to describe how Gamelan music reminded him of listening to frogs as a youngster. “Before there was rock or rap, there were people in forests banging on things. The way we organize sound comes from our surroundings. Where we’re at right now is this post-modernist trap, where you say, ‘Okay, all this stuff has been done, so let’s just pick, umm… rap and metal and let’s make rap-metal!’ Why not try to build an alternative music where roots would start from another point in history than ’50s, ’60s, ’70s music? By building new roots, you can end up somewhere else. : CD launch at La Sala Rossa on Friday, Aug. 23 >> Music Listings |
