Raccoo-oo-oon
The Cave of Spirits Forever

THE REVIEW

The music of the Raccoo-oo-oon is undoubtedly one of the most peculiar proposals I've heard in recent years. Music that at first glance appears as a total free-form mass of deviant improvisations, consisting of chants, screams, percussion, and assorted cacophonies in the wild: largely an excellent example of auditory chaos, listening to one of their records can be a plunge into the most total dissonant musical tumefaction.

In the Cave Spirits Forever is what I consider one of the easiest entry paths into the gigantic mantra that was their career, perhaps due to its relative accessibility rather than the typical Raccoo-oo-oon-ion nature of the album, and it undoubtedly shows a proper balance between the parts in the vastness of their sounds. Tribal garb, spiritual moments, evocative sounds, world music, are all vehicles of a frequently total compositional irrationality, and as such often and willingly spill over into atrocious non-sense bacchanals: should it not be so, the tracks might seemingly act solely through abstractions. As a rule, even here any hint of melody or reasoned construction immediately shows a strong intrinsic instability, and from a euphonic viewpoint, it often doesn't end well: like all their works, you face vast stretches of unhealthy jams and cacophonic outbursts enriched by some melodic concession. Taking improvisation as the key to deciphering their enigmatic tracks, I believe, is only right and proper.

Dated 2006, this mini-album maintains the standard of their sound experiments without reaching the expressive peaks of their masterpiece. Cannibal music to which I associate a strong propensity for strange rituals, which leaves in its multi-formed and no less de-formed aspect a pure interpretation to the listener, responsible for assigning a shape to these sounds with a charm of difficult comprehension.

LP