Review: Andrei Rikichi - 'Caged Birds Think Flying Is A Sickness' (Bearsuit Records)

This is class! I could leave the review just there really but I feel some exposition would be useful. First up, Bearsuit Records, a small label based in Scotland, has been responsible for releasing several Harold Nono albums and if you don't know Harold Nono please check him out toot sweet. Secondly, this debut album from Andrei Rikichi is a dazzling, somewhat discombobulating, collection of sounds and moods that is startlingly abstract and yet not in the slightest jarring.

To list all the seemingly disparate aspects of 'Caged Birds..' would be a salutory lesson in futility but simply put Rikichi takes cues from cinema, hip-hop, noise and electronica and meld them into 14 tracks that veer from the sombrely beautiful to the ear-judderingly harsh. It simply refuses to be categorised (I suppose that catch-all label of 'experimental' would cover it but that says absolutely nothing) and it would taker a braver man than I to try. It's not just about the music per se; it plays with your moods and emotions, taking you from elation to melancholy and, more often than not, in the same song. Weirdly I have been on a real Nurse With Wound kick of late and this album reminds me of some of Stephen Stapleton's wilder sound collages...and that is a real compliment from my own standpoint.

If you like your music thought provoking and, at times, unsettling then 'caged Birds..' is the album for you and I have no qualms whatsoever in saying that you will probably not hear anything like this anywhere else. It was released on Bearcat the end of August and is available as a download and on CD, both from the Bearsuit Bandcamp page here.



Links:

Bearsuit Bandcamp

Bearsuit Facebook

Andrei Rikichi Facebook