NOMO

NOMO are signed to Ubiquity, who, like English label Tru Thoughts, release absurd amounts of hotness. While browsing the Ubiquity Records MySpace blog I found this delightful little excerpt from an interview and decide to check out NOMO's myspace tunes:

The Ann Arbor, Michigan band Nomo is on the road a lot. This weekend in Minneapolis, next weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, supporting their new album Ghost Rock. For Nomo, touring is no easy feat. There are up to eight musicians and an avalanche of equipment including a bunch of instruments you've never seen before.

John Moe: I was walking around some of your instruments earlier, and I saw something called a "Brainwave Monitor."

Elliot Bergman: Yes, this is one of our most unusual instrument and one of our most dangerous as well. It's some sort of quack medical device, and I found it at a thrift store for a couple dollars. It makes a shrieking sound when you plug it into an amplifier.

It looks like a little guitar pedal, and you can plug in a diode that you would, theoretically, attach to your head and monitor what's happening in your mind. It's slowly transitioning from medical device to musical instrument.

Pitchfork have this to say:

When Nomo put out their first album back in 2004, they were still doing their own take on what was essentially someone else's thing, namely the music of the king of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti. On their second album, 2006's New Tones, they found a sound that was more their own, spiking Afrobeat horn arrangements with an array of homemade, electrified metal instruments. Now, their third album finds the Michigan collective moving further out, establishing itself as a true innovator with a style totally its own. The groove is still at the heart of the band's music, but it's a deeper, stranger pulse than they've worked before, and arrangements have shifted away from Afrobeat crunch to a spacier, more symphonic approach. Call it cosmic funk or electro-jazz or something similar, but you can't call it Afrobeat revivalism anymore.

Apparently they travel in a single van, and packing it is like "tetris with guitar amps". Their sound is on a similar kind of tip to The Heliocentrics - most tasty. Stuff like Flying Lotus doesn't really work for me, but stuff like this, put together by a live band with a shit-ton of instruments, gets the thumbs-up.