Iljus Wifmo

Feb

posted by tommy

Sydney, there’s a new bigboy in town. Technically if you add up all the members of Iljus Wifmo then it’s two new bigboys, but don’t get all maths on me guys, we’re here to discuss music and everyone knows there’s no room for numbers in music. There’s a reason they call them time signatures and not time equations. Keep it smooth. So, I caught my first taste of their new Laz EP on Tim Shiel’s Sunday Night Double J Program Something More. He spun a track from the EP called ‘Alcala’ which sounds like Black Vanilla remixing insectoid mating calls and is fairly indicative of the sort of sounds you’ll hear on the EP. The four tracker is an adventure through realms of bass manipulation and clever rhythmic maneuvering, the likes of which I haven’t the capacity to explain [well]. The heavier thumps are padded with spacious atmospheria, midnight wind through an abandoned industrial complex or boiling chemicals in a colossal iron vat. My favourite from the record is ‘Frenetic’, appropriately titled in its manic twitchiness.

<a href="http://clubwerks.origamisound.com/album/laz">Laz by IljusWifmo</a>

Hmmmm, it’s hard to put your finger on what genre this music is huh? Figuring things out is tricky. In light of this, I’ve opted to consider which genres are not relevant to this record rather than those that are.

Without further adieu, Here is a list of the genres that DO NOT apply to the new Iljus Wifmos EP.

1. Krautrock
Ha! I think we dealt with this one in the first sentence. Iljus Wifmo are from SYDNEY. Even if they enjoyed a month long holiday to Berlin they still wouldn’t qualify as krautrock. A quick Google will reveal that it takes at least one year of permanent residency in a major German city to qualify for Krautrock status and even then there is a LOT of paperwork to be done.

2. Indie-Folk
It definitely is NOT indie-folk, this almost goes without saying. It would be a very unwise decision to book Iljus Wifmo as the main supports for Angus and Julia Stone because, I repeat, they are not making an indie-folk music. You could easily let them remix a song by the Tallest Man On Earth but I’m not sure what good it would do for Tallest Man, an artist whose fans primarily like music performed on acoustic guitars with rustic vocals and parochial themes, the sort of music you could safely call indie-folk. Those fans would not be interested in an Iljus Wifmo remix.

3. Witch-Grime
Ha! Witch grime? More like the Blair Witch Project! More like Tony Blair! More like AnTony Hopkins! More like Jon Hopkins… Uh oh… Wait. Maybe this is witch grime? Hmmmm. I’m not as certain anymore, this one will require more research.

4. Soul
Now I’ll concede that there’s plenty of humanity to this Iljus Wifmo record, but if we’ve learned one thing from Richard Dawkins’ Twitter it’s that there is no God and none of us have the faintest hint of a soul so to discuss music using such an absurd framework is to completely ignore all that science has taught us. If this genre was actually called ‘Meaningless Void Of Eternal Non-Existance’ then sure, that might be appropriate, but it’s 2016 and I think we can all agree that we are all just bags of animated meat. Other acceptable names for this genre included ‘Audio’, ‘Soundwaves’ and ‘Things For Ear’.

So that’s all of them. That’s a comprehensive list of all the genres that Iljus Wifmo aren’t, everything else is absolutely on the table. As always, please use the text line to transmit your opinions on this particular topic and any other current events that you are equally unqualified to comment on.

The EP is out as of yesterday via Romanian (!) label Clubwerks.

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Tags: Sydney