UOCHI TOKI - Idioti

A new album by the Uochi Toki is something you listen to with a strange mix of curiosity and dread. What will they have come up with this time? How will Napo's tirades make me doubt my own intelligence? And will Rico's beats try to drill straight into my brain, or will they just settle for disorienting me and alienating me from any concrete activity?

Word has it that “Idioti” is their pop record. Whatever that term is supposed to mean, I'll go out on a limb here: nonsense. Consider this: I've listened to it a fair number of times – a pretty high number, at that – and I still haven't reached a clear conclusion, not just on whether I like it, but even on what the album's theme actually is. Assuming, of course, that it has one at all.

The tracks are indeed rich with repetitions, some even featuring choruses (!), yet they're also more tortuous than ever, packed with reversals and sudden shifts in mood. "La prima posizione della nostra classifica" effectively flirts with pop, but a pop seen through the distorting lens of "I fonici": sonic tricks, self-referentiality taken to the extreme, and a ruthless "disassembly" of the very mechanisms that build a piece of music. "Perifrastica" seems to deliberately jump from one non sequitur to the next, while "Tigre contro tigre" runs on wordplay, theatrical flourishes, assorted childishness and metrical about-faces. Other tracks, though – "Ecce Robot", "Umami" – show a more directed progressive development, however non-linear it remains, and seem to hint at a common thread running through the whole record.

What could it be? Who knows. I'll just venture a few guesses: experimenters, the strange world revealed by science, alien points of view. One way or another, many of the tracks deal with ideas or people that run counter to what we're used to calling "normal", exploring new territories driven by the thrill of discovery. This holds true both for the human-robot of the opening track (a sort of sci-fi primer that frames science as a religion even before it's a source of knowledge), and for the improvised nerds/carpenters/skaters of "Tavolando il pattino con Antonio Falco" or the unspecified restaurant-experimenter of "Sberloni". "Al Azif" (the supposed Arabic name for the Necronomicon – don't ask me what it has to do with anything) seems to want to present humanity from the unprecedented perspective of insects, while also digging deep into taxonomy and references to evolutionary theory; "Tigre contro tigre", on the other hand, in one of the fragments that make it up, looks at man and his language through the "inverted" lens of a hyper-analytical child.

The frequent – and surprising – use of vocal filters certainly contributes to the sense of "de-humanization" the record evokes, but it's the backing tracks that steal the show: these are, essentially, the most alienating and cyberpunk productions Rico has made so far, with the possible exception of certain very Numanesque passages around "Audiobook". They draw heavily from the coldest, most three-dimensional ambient music, yet they don't shy away from glitch flourishes, nor from the sudden return to more classically hip-hop patterns when that makes them more obsessive.

The vocabulary and concepts deployed by Napo also seem to confirm the "scientific" reading of the record. "Idioti" is a whole bouquet of biological terms, scripts that seem to echo linguistics, complexity theory (see again "Al Azif", with its insistence on the part/whole and center/periphery opposition) and even the now somewhat dated field of cybernetics.

But perhaps it's simply that in a record this intricate, this fragmented, and at least seemingly so "random" in its unfolding, one ends up hearing in it whatever one wants to hear.

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07/03/2012