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HOP FROG'S FATWA: The Silk Road Release date: TBA Format: CD Tracklist: 1: Few Pleasures 12:06 Total playingtime: 70.43 min General Facts: The Silk Road is the first release by the American music collective known as Hop-frog. It's released under the banner of Hop-frog's Fatwa and it's practically a 70:43 min long track divided into 9 parts. According to the band, it's intended as "a guerilla action against the upbeat, positive and highly overproduced "World music" of late". Review: I didn't really know what to expect when I one day discovered this disc in a package which had been sent to me all the way from the states. I had never heard anything of these guys before and I also found the rather unordinary band-name to be just a bit intriguing. After a couple of listens, The Silk Road left me with both positive and negative impressions. First I'd like to congratulate Hop-frog for succeeding in creating an original sound. The band jokingly called the music "midi-eastern" referring to the sometimes Middle Eastern sound, and this is a quite good description. It is like a blend between Arabic elements and traditional electronic music. This may lead you to think that this sounds like Muslimgauze but I don't think it does. I cannot honestly say that I have heard everything of the Bryn Jones repertoire but what I have heard does not sound very much like this. This is more mediative and drifting and it is also quite unorthodox. The Silk Road is an album full of events. There's always something happening in the foreground as well as in the background. The tracks are very long, and as I said earlier, this is just one long track that is divided into different tracks. To me it seems that these tracks form two different parts. The first parts span from the beginning of the album to the middle of the fourth track. It's composed of a quite relaxed rhytmn accompanied by some middle eastern sounding instruments, weird samples as well as playful electronic sound textures. The tracks experience a successive evolution throughout the 20 minutes and in some ways, the track grows more and more electronic and psychedelic. In a way, it can be called monotonous but at the same time, I find the term drifting more appropriate, very relaxing. Towards the end of the fourth track, the nature of the music suddenly changes, and the gentle rhytmn which has allowed us to drift easily through this music suddenly abandons us and leaves us to our agonies. The following tune is a quite solemn one but at the same time, samples and electronic disruptions creates quite a weird and sick atmosphere. The fifth track is some kind of middle intermezzo composed of a turmoil created by a multitude of samples. It kind of creates a "rainforest" effect meaning that many of the samples resemble animal cries and bird chirping. Yet it sounds quite unnatural but rest assure, it's not in a negative way but rather in an extra-terrestial sort of way. After the end of this nice little intermezzo, the track picks up again but this time it's not in the same relaxing and mediative manner as before. This time the music resembles more a chaotic sonic decay which is far more electronically synthetic than the first part. The tunes seem to have grown deformed and sick but still with the same playful fashion as before. This continues till the end and it ends with a small revisit to the more uplifting parts in the beginning, yet now they feel more like sad memories of happier days before everything got totally screwed up (note that I'm not referring to the quality of the music which is still as good as before). As I've said earlier, this record is quite psychedelic at times and it is one of these records which has a certain effect upon the human psyche. I'm normally not into experimental noise as much as I'm into Neoclassical and Dark Ambient music but I found this album to be an interesting and relaxing piece of plastic. My girlfriend however kind of freaked out and adapted a rather strange behavior when she first heard this CD; it was a rather interesting experience indeed. The only negative thing I can think of concerning the The Silk Road is that since it's based on a continuous track which spans for 70 minutes, there are of course good parts and more boring parts. The problem is that one can't just skip these parts without losing some of the atmosphere this CD creates when heard to its full extent and this is one of these albums that ought to be heard from the beginning till the end. One can of course skip tracks, but for me, it feels wrong. The average impression of these 70 minutes that I was left with was positive though. I find this CD to be an interesting release by a new band which seems to have much left to give. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FIVE QUESTIONS (splitted): The following questions were answered from the Los Angeles Department of Sewers on 3/12/02: ECTONAUT: Please introduce Hop-frog to our readers. What is Hop-frog all about? For how long have you been doing this and for what reason? HOP-FROG: Well, we started out as four friends first and foremost. That is really the glue in the fire and the MOST important factor. The whole idea is to have different projects within the hop-frog musical collective with different concepts & directions. Basically music has sucked so bad for so long that you have to create your own just to have something to fucking listen to. Technology also had a lot to do with it. Love of technology--and absolute, bash-your-head-into-the-wall hate of technology. The kind of things everyone deals with on a daily basis, but never fucking talks about. This, of course, being a metaphor for life in general in these times. It's very easy for us to identify with a child lying in the desert after it has just had both legs blown off by a mine.&nb sp; The kid has no idea what the fuck just happened. It is surrounded by various insect-like robots which mimic the sounds of the child's agonizing cries. That's the hop-frog world view in an artillery shell and that's the central image that is the basis of The Silk Road. ECTONAUT: Tell us something about the tracks on The Silk Road. Did you work with specific methods when you composed them? Is there a concept behind this release or anything else interesting that you think we should know about The Silk Road? HOP-FROG: Continuing from the latter part of your first question, it was conceived to be one continuous track limited only by the length of the cd and tells a journey through a Middle-Eastern nightmare of a country by artists (us) who've been banished from their country for producing unauthorized art. ECTONAUT: How would you describe the music of Hop-frog to completely new listeners? HOP-FROG: For The Silk Road, dark electronic with Middle-Eastern samples. The kind of music that's made by futurist anthropologists--kind of like that ringing tinge you get in your head after consuming a pesticide-drenched banana! ECTONAUT: Do you feel that Hop-frog belongs to a certain genre? HOP-FROG: No, we had to create our own to get away from the rest of the world and ECTONAUT: Are there any bands that you think you can relate to soundwise and conceptwise? HOP-FROG: No, in general, pretty much the quality of most bands since about 1985 has taken a severe nosedive. Some of are concepts may remind us of Savage Republic or "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts" (Eno/Byrne) even though we sound nothing like either of them. Of course we have musical interests in Faust, Kraftwerk, Coil, Can, Current 93, Residents, Wire and the list goes on and on and on. We can list them all day but the whole idea is to come up with something that is our own with absol utely no consideration to what is going on in music. ECTONAUT: What is most important in music according to you? How do you define quality music? HOP-FROG: It has to have a precarious nature and absolutely no commercial interest during the creative process. We're doing this for us, for our sanity. If we can get crows, crickets, and coyotes to respond to the music then it's a success for us. ECTONAUT: What are your musical influences? HOP-FROG: We're influenced by the dadaist, post-punk, George W. biting our knee caps everyday (that little shit), various foreign art-house directors, the psychedelic movement, Indian ragas, anthropological research, politics, PKD, WSB, paranormal non-fiction, surrealism, German Expressionists, working at mundane jobs, life environment...once again, the list goes on and on. ECTONAUT: What plans do you have for the future? Are there any new Hop-frog releases planned? Anything else you would like to add? HOP-FROG: We have 6 or 8 projects that are backlogged and in various stages of mixing. Technology and time work against us constantly but we will always move forward and we'll never quit. It feels as though we're fighting a fucking war, that's how we see it, push on fight to capture the next trench. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Click here to enter the Hop-frog homepage - Click here to contact Hop-frog |
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