If you've ever bought a Japanese import CD, you've probably encountered the obi strip. It's a little slip of paper folded around the spine of the CD case on which the price and CD information are printed, and it's highly sought after by collectors to prove the authenticity of their import purchases. Obi strips often include marketing phrases, similar to the shrink-wrap sticker you see in the States and elsewhere, that can offer intriguing Japanese descriptions for music that so often has to haltingly speak for itself to the Western world. On Suuto Breakor, Osaka girl duo Afrirampo's newest disc, the message is pretty clear, if roughly translated: "Forty-plus minute long trip song! In the lost forest, the swirling comet appears! Hey everyone, come play in the same forest as Afrirampo!"
This zany missive is sort of a statement of purpose for the twentysomething pair Oni and Pikachu, who have become famous thanks to a mixture of humorous noise and dangerous chaos. The girls have played varying shades of old-school Borebox-inspired "idiot-rock" since their inception in 2002, their guitar and drums enduring heavy punishment and their voices rising to banshee level and then to whisper in a breath-beat. Their eccentric, batshit-crazy ramblings have attracted such fans as Acid Mothers Temple, who has recorded with Afrirampo multiple times, as well the Boredoms, Sonic Youth, and Lighting Bolt, who have all taken the girls out on tour.
As mentioned, Suuto Breakor is basically one 42-minute song, but it's broken into seven discrete parts. As "1" skitters to a start, it seems business as usual for Oni and Pikachu, drunken slide guitar entering with nonverbal chants from the girls. But somehow the pair end up settling down into a more centered kind of groove than they've really ever played before. By the time "2" enters the picture, it's clear that Suuto Breakor tempers the loose, fierce, and generally chaotic noise-mongering by piercing into melodic spaces reminiscent of their contemporaries OOIOO.
Suuto Breakor is an especially tuneful record; it might also be their most focused. At no point do the girls scream at the top of their lungs, and only briefly does Pikachu bash on the drums, as she is prone to do, as hard as she fucking can. Between the serenely arpeggiated guitar of "5" and the spare jungle drums of "2" (accompanied by some Seadrum-esque piano), Oni manages to actually communicate a fully-formed melody. The climax of the CD is found on tracks six and seven, where the girls establish a sing-song melody that rises and falls to a sweet little guitar riff.
Interviews with the pair are always a little baffling. The girls tend to act a bit off-the-wall and salty to interviewers, (Q: "What are your hobbies?" A: "DRINKING"), but they also front this ineffable sincerity towards their music, and seem to practice some form of feel-good feminism ("Woman never die!!"). Oni and Pika seem determined to keep any questions of their values, even their actual humanity, at arm's length. But it's certain that whatever random forest they managed to land in, whichever backwoods tract they've managed to spiral down into, it really wouldn't be a bad idea to track out there and learn a bit about whatever random-ass philosophical truths they've obviously already figured out and serenely communicate on this album.
