bola - "fyuti"

bola soup. bola mauver. it took me awhile to catch this one's pun: "bowl of yew tea". what an englishman's doing with yew tea, i can't say, but thanks to globalization and the interweb, one need need never find oneself short on antioxidants, no matter what nation you call home.

bola's second album, fyuti, is similarly puzzling, a dense, meticulously-constructed affair that lacks the obvious (bola serial) tropes so readily employed by his peers or the uplifting aquarium-ambience of his skillful, "artificial intelligence"-ish debut, soup. if anything, fitton dove deeper and longer than before, into the remote waters unlit by drexciya's phosphorescent cities, and the music he found there is as strange and beautiful as the specimens he captured (if you were lucky enough to see him perform live, he had video footage).

soup, certainly a classic of the genre, was unapologetically and almost uniformly atavistic. mauver was competent, but underwhelming. fyuti just comes out of nowhere, sounding at once unprecedented and teasingly familiar, all blips and squelch at first pass, dense soundcollage the next, electro and downtempo from sun ra's outerspace fishtank after that. when the music becomes so intricate and dense and the fingers of claustrophobia start to caress the base of your skull, bola lets you up for air, and during these moments, as when veronex cipher's submarine engine-room clatter falls silent and a dramatic plucked string melody resounds heartbreak for all to hear, that you wish this cd could never end. everything fitton has done, from his earliest track on the second artificial intelligence compilation to the shape twelve-inches, has led up to this album. indelible.

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