Kobi - Live in Japan & Earplugged

Live in Japan | Earplugged

Kobi should be a well known name for people who knows their Norwegian experimental underground-music now. It's a project by Kai Mikalsen, usually joined by various friends. This time he comes with a solo studio album (Earplugged) and a live album from his Japan-tour in 2007 (surprise surprise, Live in Japan). I've never heard Kobi as noisy as this before (with the exception of the album's release concert in Oslo), but at the same time I would not say it's complete noise either. This could be said about both albums, but let's try to separate them as they're quite different from each other.

Earplugged: You'll find a good combination between low and high frequencies, and though its loads of variations on the release it's also a good example on how important a tracklisting is. It works very well as a whole and the thirteen pieces on the album floats through each other smooth as silk. Kai shows us here that he has the ability to very well control what he does and it gives me a feeling of being both a very composed, but at the same time improvised album. It's very organic and it's just enough material on there. I hear an album every once in a while where if I didn't have a clock near me I couldn't tell whether I had listen to music for 10 or 80 minutes, and this is such a release. It gives me just the right amount of music to want to maybe wanna put it on again as I could've listen to it for a little longer, but at the same time it's not at all too short. It's perfect, and I love finding records that gives me this feeling. It's also produced very well, and being packed with many high pitched tones all the way through, I think the final master has come out very well. It could easily have been an exhausting listening experience, but at least to me it was not. It may be because of my hardened hearing (to say it like it is, I'm not quite earplugged), but I think the balance is done very well here. I may have just repeated myself here with different ways of saying the same thing over and over, but I wanna get it through that I truly enjoyed the production value of the record as I hear loads of albums based on similar ideas that really doesn't work that well. It's in a way very minimalistic and I would rather call it a musique concrete album than a noise album. It's a total different listening experience than what I get from regular noise releases, and also very different from the rest of Kobi's discography so far.

Live in Japan: Here you'll find three live recordings from Kobi's Japan tour in March, 2007, that he went on with Love Hz and Crazy River. Here we get Kai joined by others as we're used to and on the first two tracks he plays with Petter Flaten Eilertsen (now a member of the regular live constellation of Kobi, and also the guy behind Love Hz) on two very different tracks. The first could hardly be classified as anything else but noise, while the second is more, well... Kobi. Its noisy ambient music and I have a hard time trying to explain what I mean about it being Kobi-sounding, but that's what it is! The same could be said about the third and last track where Kai is joined by Kelly Churko. It's a bit more noisy again and maybe a little more space sounding than usual, but Kobi nevertheless. It's way more variated as a whole than Earplugged, and more a documenting release than an album, but I bet the pieces chosen for this disc are carefully chosen, 'cause it sounds good, and never does it get too much.

Both are available from LOOOP.