kaboom karavan: hokus fokus

Bram Bosteels' Kaboom Karavan project reappears out of the thick Belgian jungle to deliver what must be one of the strangest and most exotic records since Gultskra Artikler's uncategorizable Kasha iz Topora. After the already quite surreal Barra Barra album on Miasmah from 2011, Bram takes his sound further into unknown yet still strangely familiar territories. Listening to Hokus Fokus feels like staring frozenly into a postcard sent from your long-lost uncle that went missing in the Amazon after an expedition gone wrong (circa year 1935). Merge this image with the decaying sounds of an old Tom Waits record slowly tuning out in the background and you're getting close. This is not instantly gratifiable music, but rather, a thick fog of details, sounds and atmospheres blended together with utmost precision and skill to create something quite unique that really shines with repeated listening and full immersion. Coming from a background as a notorious piano husk experimenter, film, theater, and dance composer, as well as regular Kreng collaborator, Bram has set off to confuse and wonder us with this selection of highly amazing Kaboom Karavan alternate-universe pieces fittingly entitled Hokus Fokus. For fans of '50s exotica records, Jeff Beal's score for Carnivalé (the TV show) and Andy Votel/Demdike Stare-curated Pre-Cert entertainment (with artists such as Anworth Kirk and Slant Azymuth).