BITOI - Sirkulu

How should we interpret the acronym BITOI? Of course, it doesn't take much to find the information needed to decode it: it's Cassius Lambert himself, Swedish bassist of Ethiopian descent and founder of the project, who reveals on the band's website that it stands for "Bass Is The Original Instrument". Not "original" in the sense of showing originality, mind you — though that too is certainly a trait of this quartet's debut album, starting with its lineup: Lambert himself as the sole instrumentalist, plus three vocalists, Swedish singer Alexandra Shabo and Danes Lise Kroner and Anja Tietze Lahrmann. So in what sense "original"?

The musician explains that it's an explicit reference to Joan La Barbara, the vocal experimentalist who came up in the Seventies among the New York minimalists, whose 1976 debut was titled, fittingly, "Voice Is The Original Instrument". Lambert's aim, then, is to trace the source code of the human capacity to produce sound, in order to carry out an ambitious manipulation of it: the result is a cyborg graft, in which vocal cords vibrate together with the metal strings of the electric bass, as part of a single organ.

Take, for instance, "FI-O-OI". In the bass sequence underpinning it, Lambert immediately unfurls a good part of the vast array of techniques he has mastered: plucks and percussive touches, polyrhythms, impossible harmonics. A single voice begins to phrase, enunciating fragments of a nonexistent language: as in every track on the album, these are phonetic transcriptions of birdsong, lifted from the volume "Europas Fåglar I Färg" given to the bassist by his grandfather. Then the other voices join in to thicken the weave, soon aided by electronic scans triggered by Lambert himself. The result is a forest of sonic signs with both a melodic and rhythmic role, in which the distinction — if it ever existed — between natural and artificial dissolves.

The shared Swedish origins, the coexistence of choral textures and drum-like cadences, and the ornithological references all call to mind more than one association with the Wildbirds & Peacedrums of "Rivers". In truth, in half the tracks on "Sirkulu", with a carefully judged alternation, the syncopations and pronounced accents settle down, and the electric bass, filtered through myriad pedals, limits itself to generating otherworldly backdrops, as in the submarine echoes that open "DE-RU-BIM" before it turns into tides of distortion.

In the moments when the voices are left almost entirely on their own ("BU-RU-SE"), the influence of the most accessible strand of sacred post-minimalism becomes even more apparent (think of David Lang's "I Lie", famous for its appearance in the soundtrack of "La Grande Bellezza").

In their abstraction, the vocalizations of the BITOI project converge toward a universal folklore, in which songs with unpredictable meters seem to imitate the labyrinthine syllabic patter of Indian konnakol in its less frenetic phases, before evoking mysterious Bulgarian or Occitan harmonizations ("MI-RO-SE"). This blend of exoticism and technology seems to be the heir of certain shadowy experiments from the Eighties: Lambert's fretless strings hint at a fusion background on "PA-SI-PA", writhing and thrashing like muscles torn from Mick Karn on an operating table, and anyone lucky enough to have heard Hugo Largo can't help but start at the mention of a project for bass and voices alone.

The tracklist of "Sirkulu" holds at least two oddities. Rather than closing with the potentially perfect finale "SEKOMITSE", which combines the record's most discernible melody with an inexorable forward drive, the album ends with "MA-A-GOA", a reprise with variations of "DE-RU-BIM". But above all, the album plays its masterpiece-track right away, as the opener. On "TI-RI-MA", Lambert coaxes from his instrument the sound of an unidentifiable stringed instrument and builds a memorable riff, which grows richer with minute variations and shifts in timbre as the voices close in around it in a progressive embrace. After two minutes, you find yourself tiptoeing across a crystalline sonic surface, off which circular choruses bounce along with a bass undecided between free digression and the imitation of some strange clockwork mechanism. The intonations distort, the frequencies bend like rubber under the weight of the electronics, and there — we see Lambert, Shabo, Kroner and Lahrmann turning bolts, springing locks, prying open cages: the aviaries are flung wide, a rustle of wings sweeps over us, the opening riff returns, and in our minds we follow a flock of brightly colored birds crossing the sky above the Ngorongoro crater, reddened by the sunset, driven on by African handclapping. Up there, beyond the clouds, where there are no borders and all peoples are united in a single song.

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25/12/2025