Kokum – Impressions of Environment (Baba Vanga, 2015)

Published October, 2015
by Easterndaze

Kokum’s sound harks back to those times in musical history that cherished the primordial and the raw. A ritualistic narrative inspired by his interest in “primitive ancient things” and his search for what is irredeemably lost. Every track tells a story, using the voice as the instrument, with a relentless rhythmic backdrop. Vulnerable, fragile, but raw and commanding at the same time, the voice is at the centrepoint of Kokum’s artistic practice.

Possessing the grit and grainy, angry melancholia of the 80s/early 90s UK industrial/noise/psychedelic scene, the likes of Shadow Ring, Ramleh or Skullflower, Kokum uses instruments which are not music instruments per se – in the great old tradition of Einstürzende Neubauten and the like – cutlery, vessels, a table leg… “Everything has own its sound and this is important to me.”

Impressions of Environment is a soundtrack to aimless walks in a wasteland, that at the tail end of the Thatcherite era might have seemed desolately bleak but at least concrete in terms of its antithesis. In 2015, it just expresses the omnipresent angst and clueless void that we are staring into.