Kero Kero Bonito: Fourth World is ‘a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques’ according to its creator, American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell. Even better, if we follow these parallel timelines where they lead, we end up creating our own new modernities ones that reflect our personal priorities and could even offer lessons for the reality we find ourselves in. It answers both mindless traditionalism and bland, unrelatable modernisation-for-its-own-sake. The Off-Modern Manifesto still has poignant implications today. It easily generates dusty, broken, and decidedly non-modern sounds that are hard to wrangle from software, and with Logic X's multi-tracking and MIDI sequencing facilities these can be spun into glistening mechanical constellations you swear you can touch. We use an old sampler, the Korg DSS-1, on all of the Civilisation tracks. They’re also informed by our modern perspective and comparatively recent innovations, like DAWs and online collaboration the result is a unique product of our time and place, but with associations transcending both. To an extent, songs like ‘The Princess and the Clock’ and ‘When the Fires Come’ could have existed 35 years ago, but crucially (and unlike everyone’s favourite Italo-disco records) they definitely did not. On Civilisation I and II, we aimed to make the most fantastical pop music we could using only old hardware synthesisers – coveted commercial flotsam from another era. Off-modernism is a stance that fires our imagination with the cultural tools at our disposal now. Such an approach acknowledges modern society’s inescapable sense of longing, the inevitable enclosure of revivalism, and the complex, unexplainable subjectivity that defines art (and the human race) all at once. In other words, tracing cultural evolution, seizing upon unrealised ‘what if’ moments – those hypothetical fantasies every bit as plausible as the established narrative performed by error-prone humans – and investigating them ourselves moving sideways, instead of backwards or forwards. Kero Kero Bonito: The term ‘off-modern’ was coined by Svetlana Boym, an artist and cultural theorist who postulated a realistic alternative to both arbitrary modernisation and insatiable nostalgia: exploring ‘the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity’. Incorporating rigidly pentatonic passages, repetitive chants, and synthesised metallophones to conjure otherworldly soundscapes, the band explain, “By bringing ancient techniques into our work, we want to both refresh pop music and situate it within the grand scheme of humanity”.īelow, Kero Kero Bonito expand on five things that inspired the EP.
Her hollow and echoey voice is offset by the track’s frenetic melody, which only adds to the feeling of being neither here nor there. Synths whizz and whir like a spaceship taking flight, as Perry delivers a spoken-word sermon about modern life: “ False prophets proclaim that the end is nigh and that humanity is not worth existence.” High priestess-like, she reminds us that “ this is a trap laid to ensnare the living”. The closing track “Well Rested” is a seven-minute, acid house epic about humanity.
Delivered in an unaffected tone, Perry’s lyrics are matter-of-fact, like a diary entry or a shopping list: “ I set a call up with a friend/ A means towards an end, ’til we can meet again/ Hey, so, how are you doing?/ I’m okay, you know, the usual kinda weird.” When put together with Lobban and Bulled’s sunny yet quietly melancholic instrumentals, the result is strangely unsettling. Opening track “The Princess and the Clock” is a peppy, 8-bit fairytale about a kidnapped protagonist who’s trapped in a castle, while “21/04/20” recounts a day in Bromley during the first lockdown: needing to go for a walk, seeing ambulances pass, scheduling in a call with a friend. The three tracks are divided into past, present, and future.
The EP was loosely inspired by American trumpeter Jon Hassell’s concept of ‘fourth world’ music, which brings together primitive and modern sounds, to bring forth “fantastical fictional cultures”, or imagined worlds that feel real.
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