sound.delirium//reviews - Volapuk Where Is Tamashii?

    A French drummer and composer Guigou Chenevier founded Volapuk at the beginning of 90s together with cellist Guillaume Saurel and clarinettist Michel Mandel after he has carried out enough experiments in another projects. The things Volapuk creates can be roughly characterised as a mixture of folk-music, gypsy dances, rock and a lot more other stuff. Chenevier resembles me of a child who ecstatically builds a castle out of old toys, encyclopaedias, granny's family jewels and his own dirty socks :-).
    Where Is Tamashii? – is the fourth Volapuk's record and the second for the extraordinary violinist and lead-singer Takumi Fukushuma. And here are my first and absolutely idiotic impressions of the work, that can only be excused with my naughty and really spring mood.
    The word Coda at the end make us understand that there is also the beginning, the middle and the album itself was thought out as a whole, not a chaotic number of tracks. In the outline you see the intricate plot worth such masterpieces of Japanese animation as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, etc. The first song is modest and fine, together with a smooth-tongued girlie we set ourselves to find out Where Is Tamashii? (Takumi Fukushuma is definitely among those, who can keep you good company "to place yourself under the wind in bamboo thicket in summer, to go up the tower and watch the moon in autumn, to dream about summer in winter and to wander along the carpet of newly opened flowers in summer"). And still if you make up your mind to set off looking for Tamashii, pay attention to Celtic violins. And if you aren't in captivity of vague associations with some devious folk ladies (fairies along with sirens) – be self-assured enough to move on. The business is but not so simple: now and then your ear catches someone's quiet complaints and warnings (persistent insects-stringed instruments), but a moving view on a village appears just in time to blunt the watchfulness. Meanwhile "the high lady" starts showing her capricious temper (no sign of golden butterflies and bluebells, no more) and then vanishes into the air, leaving the travellers in the middle of the bewitched forest (somewhere around the fifth track). You are to go on travelling on your own, "finally going where the heart calls you" (and still you have had that gutter feeling). Pictures change each other as folded back fantastical veils, local residents either make fun of you, or try to warn about something… The end comes as unexpectedly at an unsteady note as a sudden awakening in the midst of a frightening dream. By the way, we haven't found Tamashii, but attach no importance to it, the most important is the great way…
    And to be serious all in all it gives the impression of a strange mixture of jazz, folk, traditional Chinese-Japanese music (the composition Boom boom with national percussions and specific, a bit catlike soprano). But differently to the other group alike, this one stands on a rather solid foundation of classical academic education which can't but make the ears glad. Moreover there are a lot of surprises and exercises stored for an inquisitive mind in the form of rattles, bells, bamboo sticks tapping against a tin-plate, thick and leisurely stringed instruments and once I even heard practically balalaika passage – no wonder I have such fantasmagoric associations. And all the above is not without sense if we take into consideration that Volapuk is a universal language like Esperanto that was created in 1880. A lot of its elements were arbitrary, but some were just crippled word versions from well-known national European languages. That was the reason for the quick decline of Volapuk which we do not wish to our nice gropu with the same name.
     Slyness and capriciousness, education and gentleness, intricate winking – the music so to say doesn't insist to be listened to, sets out traps, but at he same time, lets you softly overcome all its symbolic obstacles, allows you to get back (or awaken) at any moment. But oh, it's simply a dream, where "the queerer the pictures are, the clearer you feel the sensitivity of a vigilant heart"