Hey, here’s a weird idea for all you experimental musicians out there: instead of crawling so far up your own ass to impose Serious Meaning on your work, why don’t you loosen up for once and have a little bit of fun? Take Maharadja Sweets over here – you think this guy is pondering the human condition or lamenting the human condition or even giving the human condition the time of day? No, he’s getting as far away from the human condition as possible, crawling around in the middle of his yard (he might not have a yard) and sticking his beak among the grass and dirt, communing on the level of insects and other creepy crawlies. The denizens of the slithering kingdoms, as they were.
With his head down and his rump in the air, Maharadja Sweets crafts a bunch of mini odes to what he finds down there, the centipedes, millipedes, “zillipedes,” beetles, grasshoppers, frogs, crickets, potato bugs, tarantulas, aphids, ladybugs, carpenter ants, fire ants, wolf spiders, water bugs, midges, mites, caterpillars, pill bugs, stink bugs, honeybees, earthworms, weevils, white-line sphinx larvae, toads, hookworms, cutworms, locust borers, black flies, earwigs, box elders, cicadas, ticks, maggots, scorpions, trapdoor spiders, black widows, horntails, wasps … [INNNHAAAAAAALE] … and fleas.
The skittering noise of Slithering Kingdoms (Oxtail Recordings) encounters unexpected melodies among the rhythms and patterns of life forms. This audio equivalent of A Bug’s Life meets National Geographic (or, ahem, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids on really, really bad acid) sounds like way more fun than another treatise on, I dunno, postmillennial urban malaise [dismissive wanking motion].
Press your nose to the loam: