Cibo Matto
Viva! La Woman

THE REVIEW

The first album by Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, known as Cibo Matto, Japanese residents in New York, was released in 1996: Yuka, an expert in samplers and keyboards, and Miho, a singer and DJ.
Two young girls with a wide musical kitchen that spans various musical styles with great ease, experimenting with new sounds: their music emerges from the fusion of jungle rhythms, drum'n'bass, and ambient with '70s sounds, from the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim to film music, boasting the most diverse collaborations: Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Brooklin Funk Essentials, Caetano Veloso.

Viva! La Woman is an album served like a menu, where each track has a reference to food, and where languages and cultures mix: an atmosphere between enchantment and dream fills us when listening to "Sugar Water" - the theme of the program Kitchen aired on MTV a few years ago – to slide gently into "White Pepper Ice Cream". The rhythm rises again in "Birthday Cake", but the final jewel comes with "Artichoke", a syncopated and poignant rhythm.

They belong to the same pop scene produced in a Tokyo neighborhood called Shibuya, alongside groups like Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine, to which Cibo Matto surely refer, creating a heterogeneous and varied product.