New Release: Mu: Afro Finger & Gel

[DudeAsInCool]

In her broken Eng-rish, about midway through "Chair Girl", Japan's Mutsumi Kanamori, the wife half of Sheffield-based duo Mu, creeks out the maxim that "DJs awh wock band," while her husband, Baltimorean Maurice Fulton, whips Model 500 basslines around submarine alarms and a dubbed-out salsa beat. It all makes sense for a second, until I re-read the lyrics and realize that she's actually saying: "Deejays are rocked by an electric chair girl." I misunderstand her, but the two impressions, be they of a dancefloor-manifesto or the sensual-personal, are both extremes that get delved into on the couple's debut, Afro Finger and Gel. Lasciviously sliding along that axis between their ten songs, the fluctuation only fuels my infatuation with Mu. Hers is the heavily-FX'd split personalities; his is the manic approach to beat-chopping that swallows up classic Chicago house, second-line whistles, digital uprisings, even Cubano instrumentation; and together, the couple have birthed one bizarre, brilliant album.

Over a hairy squelch, "Jealous Kids" opens as damning and acerbic as LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", berating hipsters with lines like, "Insecure kids can't [sic] close to me/ Frightened kids can't dance," and, "Bored kids are trying to kick me off/ Are we still high school kids?" As the beat turns into nasty bleeps and a steel door the size of the Grand Canyon thuds shut on the sweaty masses, Mutsumi flips her vocal presets to the "Another Brick in the Wall"-style chant-chorus of "How many days can we life for?/ How many times are we smiling?/ How many people can we know about?/ How many music can we feel to?" sneering at the onlookers as she morphs into a digital wraith and scares all the kids off the dancefloor with abrasive shrieks.

It's all in good fun, though, as "Let's Get Sick" coughs up Liquid Liquid's leftfield lugies at a ferocious pace with a full minute of air-raid sirens before Mu's processed voice gets beamed down to walk on Yoko Ono's thin ice, cracking cold cowbells and ice-picking timbales with each four on the floor. She barks direct orders about being positive and calling in sick to work so that she and her man can lay about all day, puffing on a spliff. She even goes so far as to rhyme "we feel each others' bodies" with "kisses to my oranges," which is ticklish enough, but then proceeds to go doot-doot ahhhhhh like Stereolab used to do, before snapping out of her haze with a scream of "Fuck that!"

Between the jackhammering title track, faithful hubby Fulton draws a post-coital Calgon bath and ambient cooldown for the missus, bubbling like classic Oval or Orb in between her distorted orgasms. The sexual frankness of this track and the glitch'n geisha cuss-out of "Hello Bored Biz Man" isn't as blatantly gaudy as cuts by electr'ho's like Peaches or Avenue D, although it's a hundred times more psychotic. Still, no amount of prophylactic protection or chemical inoculation can prepare you for the illness of "My Name Is Tommi". Based on a UK television show that pits couples against each other, Mutsumi simultaneously plays the cheating boyfriend, the hysterical girlfriend, the announcer, and the Jawa-voiced host while the entire set is destroyed around them, their personas melting into an icky id-mess that wallows in the nastiest, most petulant part of human nature, complete with commercial breaks for its viewers/listeners.

The last half of the album embeds the most enlightening messages in its manic and intricate beats. "Tell You Something" strangles a late-era Funkadelic lick over what could be the "Billie Jean" beat, while Mu shouts over a rubbery bassline that "Jealousy doesn't give you anything/ Let's change the way people think.../ Make a revolution to yourself." I start to believe her as her voice distorts into a Kelis-like tongue lashing over a pole-axed break of broken Afro-Cuban percussion and flickering glitches. She explains her predicament further: "I tried to be nice to everyone/ I said yes to everything/ Contradiction was getting bigger in my mind/ I found a lot difference between what I said and what I think."

Appropriating the melody of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" for "Destroying Human Nature", Mutsumi's voice gets "screwed" down to a slurred baritone as she plaintively wonders, "Do you have anyone who can comfort you?/ Drugs, money, fame.../ Too many things can destroy human nature.../ I really hope you don't let yourself to lose them." For what will most likely be played out on the dancefloor, it's a weird question to ask the revelers and ravers, the anorexic models and fashionable kids.

2003 might go down as a year in which some rock records learned how to dance (Electric Six, !!!, The Rapture, Ssion) and some dance records learned to rock (Basement Jaxx, T. Raumschmiere, Fat Truckers), but Afro Finger and Gelstraddles the diametrically opposed genres obliviously, not giving a fuck. It lashes out at the p®etty people with their limited vision, imploring them to put aside their differences and encouraging everyone to be true to themselves (and their humanity) above all, either between two people or between the sheets. Simultaneously fun and dark, ludicrous and serious, it's a fucked-up and uplifting record. "So we are only human/ Misunderstand each other," Mu confesses at one point, and the message is undeniable, even if it's a bit hard to make out.

-Andy Beta, December 5th, 2003 • Pitchforkmedia