TIPSY - Buzzz

The Tipsy project springs from a boundless love of music. Dave Gardner, a passionate collector of easy listening and industrial avant-garde, moved from the Bay Area to San Francisco, where he met Tim Digulla, a devotee of psychedelia and science fiction known for staging strange musical performances with robots and electronic instruments. A meeting with the owner of the fledgling Asphodel label gave the duo the chance to make one of the most hilarious lounge and exotica albums around.

Four years passed between the 1997 debut "Trip Tease", on which the group painstakingly reconstructed various melodies from the 50s and 60s, and the next time we heard from Tipsy. On their second album, "Uh Oh", the duo engages with styles and musicians from very different backgrounds, without turning their backs on Martin Denny, Les Baxter and Esquivel, while adding a dark touch to their repertoire.

Eight years of silence followed, filled by the duo's most cohesive and refined project, “Buzzz”: its brilliant blend of quotations and original melodies creates a disorienting effect that pulls the listener into a space-time distortion both bewitching and seductive.

Built from samplers and live sounds, the album's groove never lets up for a moment: glockenspiel, piano, strings, flutes, guitars and sax chase one another over graceful harmonies, and the compositions hold up to endless listens — with no surprises, but no tedium either.

The variety of styles coalesces into a one-of-a-kind work that only faintly echoes similar efforts elsewhere; its almost facsimile-like reproduction of themes and moods achieves a precision that lends real depth to the music's evident frivolity.

The opening “Midnight Party”, with its frenzied glockenspiel and reverb-soaked guitar, plunges the listener straight into the duo's colorful carousel of sounds; the unpredictable jazz of “Swingin' Spaceman” and the powerful ethnic rhythm of “Lipstick Tree” mark the record's most dynamic moments, but the bizarre sci-fi construction of “Good Little Demon” (with its Shaft quotation) remains one of the most hilarious passages.

More relaxing yet never predictable moods emerge on the excellent “Chocolate Moon”, where the languid atmosphere is interrupted by jittery guitar incursions, while classic lounge defines “A Night On The Town” and the dreamy “Kitty's Daydream”. A powerful horn riff, on the other hand, shatters the leaden mood of “Kadonka”, one of the album's most original tracks.

No track feels superfluous, but “See The Beauty, Touch The Magic” deserves special mention for its grand orchestration, built on unexpected counterpoints and harmonies without ever losing the grace and lightness that define this fascinating, genre-crossing work.

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23/02/2009