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If you lift up the linoleum tiles, you'll find the remnants of the previous tenants' carpet. Soulo, a two- man music team from Los Angeles, is gingerly lifting up the tiles of pop and electronic music's prior inhabitants. Shawn King and Nate Flannigan, Soulo's musical duo, create a dreamy beats- driven techno/ ambient sound that is both new and oddly familiar. Their first album, which is self- titled, is soon to be released on the Plug Research label. The band will follow the album's release with a U.S. and German tour. While Soulo employ much of the loop/sample/sequencing equipment that is standard issue in the ambient music field, a discrepancy worth noting is that Soulo illuminates what musical terrain they go at with equipment appropriated from ye olde rock as well. With guitar/ bass/ percussion as a skeleton, and melody as prime fluid, Soulo makes electric songs like a whale- oil torch illuminating the future. The most sleep- inducing question in music will always be "is ____ dead?" (is Jazz dead? is Rock dead?) Soulo inhabits the genre named post- rock, whose very existence, annoyingly enough, amplifies the question. Such an open- ended and meaningless term, (After all rock music itself is post- Ragtime, but that doesn't inform us much about the music's form) but the term Post- Rock is helpful, for it describes a genre in which savvy and smart musicians, with savvy and smart record collections, can explore fusions of seemingly opposing types of music in much the same way as a DJ can marry funk and disco and rock and electric song- parts to make something else. Post- rock, a place occupied by many an old rock fan in search of a new musical turn- on, becomes some sort of rock and roll retrospective. Post- rockers marry Kraut angularity and irony with free- jazz open constructions and fusion's concentrated electrical sound, under a punk- spirited flag. With post- rock, the similarities to hip hop are many, and the Plug Research label houses many artists who've cross- pollinated with L.A.'s independent hip- hop scene. We talk about the inevitable, but most people are afraid to even glance forward. Soulo levitate from a point on the horizon and land on our step. Not to say that Soulo is courageous. Soulo is inward reflective rock- unsteady. Shawn King and Nate Flanigan left art school the day after the computers were installed. If you left art school by 1995, you missed the computers. You lost, big time. They became re-acquainted at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago, a subsidiary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the time, the two were interested in abandoning the rock. Is it romantic to soften the hardness of a soundtrack to a break dancing video game? Is it worthwhile to enliven the new- age fugue with a surprise ending? Does science gain moral obligation when it teams up with the hopes and risks that art rolls with? Or does the art lose its sense? Soulo's music is too discreet to be rock, too jammin1 to be ambience, and too eventual to be the blues. But you could use any title from the Jimi Hendrix song book to name any given Soulo track. Wind Cried Mary 3rd Stone from the Sun etc. That would make the Krauts happy. And that would make Soulo happy. |
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