Pixvae (2016)
8 tracks, 45 minutes
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There so many fusions, combinations and admixtures all across the world of music. We’ve considered a fair few on this blog, and there will be many more to come. Some fusions are incredibly effective and frequently successful due to many inherent and obvious similarities in their constructions – think jazz hip-hop or West African blues. Some take such wildly disparate styles, smush them together and fall flat on their face to the surprise of hardly anyone. And then you have fusions between musical genres that should never work, from very different times, places, and culture, but that end up creating mad, previously unthought-of mid-point that sounds so natural and potent you feel a fool for ever having doubted it.
To that end, stick Pixvae in your ears. Their music is Afro-Colombian math rock with a death metal jazz edge. The band is actually a six-piece collision of two groups, with guitar, drums and baritone sax/synths from the group Kouma and three voice and percussion from Bambazú. Why does it work? I don’t know, but it does.
The Colombian element is currulao, a style from the Pacific coast of the country. It is based on percussion polyrhythms and interconnected vocal lines that duck and dive over each other as well as making sweet harmonies. Having developed among the Afro-Colombian population, the music still retains a strong African vibe. In the original style, it is all held together with the marimba xylophone, but instead, in Pixvae, that place is filled by noise.
Great noise, mind. The ‘math’ element of the rock means that even more complex polyrhythms are added to those of the currulao, meaning at some points there can be three or four different beats going on at the same time, all shifting in and out of phase with each other. The guitar, saxophone and synths are very loud and all have their own rawness to them – the reedy honking of the sax, the overdriven distortion of the guitar, the sawtooth waves of the synth – but they still manage to add to the sound in a subtle way, mostly focusing on short and interesting riffs that loop around and around. Again, these riffs are usually of differing lengths but played simultaneously so that the effect is ever-shifting and evolving.
When both of these come together, they fit together in a really pleasing way. They don’t always fit together easily – there are lots of crunchy dissonances created in all of the different overlapping vocal and instrumental patterns – but the shifting nature of the melodic and rhythmic cycles mean that each piece contains waves of tension and release. Even the sweetness of the vocals against the noise of the instruments provide a juxtaposition that doesn’t need a resolution, they’re just two very different flavours that nevertheless combine perfectly, like chocolate and salt.
Afro-Colombian folk music and heavy math rock jazz seem too far removed to birth a successful fusion, but Pixvae found the elements that link them and exploit them to the grooviest ends. Maybe no musical fusion is too ambitious to work, perhaps it just needs the right musicians to find those connections. Pixvae do it in the most exciting way possible.
N.B. In my research for this album I came across the review in Songlines Magazine…and they gave it a one-star review! Bollocks to that. What do music journalists know anyway?!
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