It is entirely possible that Juju & Jordash’s Sis-boom-bah! is the only techno record you will hear this year that features wah-wah guitar. But then, the Israeli-Dutch duo is hardly your typical club-music proposition. Gal Aner and Jordan Czamanski, both jazz aficionados, approach their live gigs in the spirit of pure improvisation, heaping their gear table high with sundry machines, many of them years if not decades old, and jamming away. They start from scratch—no preset synth patches, no pre-programmed rhythms—and make it up as they go along, building woozy, wooly, and sometimes downright noodly grooves out of nothing but the circuitry they brought with them. They approach their records in much the same way. The only difference is that the recording studio offers many more possibilities for cutting away the excess and honing in on the meat of the idea, the sinew of the groove.
Sis-boom-bah! is their fifth and most streamlined record yet. Juju & Jordash typically oscillate between freeform abstraction and Detroit-inspired techno, but this is more like their take on new age. Where they were once happy to whack away on a fat 909 snare, here they’ve whittled all the drum sounds down until they’re little more than suggestions of percussive energy: neatly filed hi-hats, shadows of kick drums, snares that are all rattle and no smack. A few songs have no recognizable drums at all, and on several tracks, liquid tones drip like a serum squeezed from an eyedropper, reinforcing the sense that the two musicians have distilled their sound to its essence. Though it’s still recognizable as dance music, this is a vision of techno that has wandered far from the dancefloor and has no great interest in going back—a little like a raver who has wandered into the woods and is happy to remain there, communing with the trees, while pinging droplets and distant synth riffs filter through the foliage.
“Herkie” opens the album like a statement of intent: part electric Miles, part Motor City synths, it rolls elliptical rings of Rhodes keyboards, plucked guitar, and greasy bass tones around rattling, metallic percussion. The circular vamping serves as a kind of scene-setting, building energy without arriving at any particular destination; swelling synth pads and lilting tambourine amplify the sense of drift. “Rah-Rah” picks up the same palette and adds trickling liquids, Hammond flutter, and guttural chants, for a skipping house groove that only hits cruising altitude in its final minute.
With the third track, “Back Tuck Basket Toss,” Juju & Jordash ease into the syncopated chords of piano house (and, for fun, some gnarly digital slap bass). It’s the record’s clubbiest cut yet, even though it’s slower than the two that have preceded it. The album’s sequencing follows a curious organizing principle: Each successive track across the first half of the album is slower than the last. The effect is not so much to lessen the energy level as to darken the mood and deepen the intensity of every pulse, and with the following track, “Deadman,” things get truly entrancing. There’s a hint of a talking drum in the toms; a low wind blows through the track’s ample empty space. Knowing when not to play is one of the most important instincts an improviser can develop. Here, and across the album, they flex those chops brilliantly.
The tempos bottom out with “Paper Dolls” and “Hanging Pyramid,” a pair of tracks that hover around the 90-BPM mark, and which collectively comprise the record’s beating heart. “Paper Dolls” plays highlife-inspired guitar off delicately detuned synthesizer, and its triplet pulse lends to a dizzy sort of slow/fast quality, while “Hanging Pyramid,” the album’s most unassuming cut, applies double-time pulses to a barely-there array of marimba and handclaps, like a drum ‘n’ bass remix of Jon Hassell. Both are dazzlingly pointillistic. The remaining three tracks build up the energy once more, but it’s here at the album’s cavernous center that the duo's skills shine brightest, as they carefully (but never fussily) polish their sounds to a dull gleam, weaving everything into a loose lattice of pluck and ping. Keeping one finger on the pulse without ever submitting entirely to it, they highlight the tension between the rhythmic grid—rigid, unrelenting—and the slipperiness of the objects that pass through it. Sis-boom-bah! is a celebration of techno at its most elastic.
