Kobol’s Ignacio Chavez and Argel Medina originally first met when they were both living in the Northern Mexican town of Ensenada, making something of a local mark with the avant pop band Sonios, before going on to form the more free jazz/rock-oriented Nino Astronauta. While these early years also saw Chavez working amongst the famed Nortec Collective with his Plankton Man project, 2001 saw the duo both relocate to LA, a move that lead to the formation of their jazz-influenced electronic outfit Kobol. This second album from the duo as Kobol Extempore places the emphasis on their remixing skills for a range of other artists including fellow Nortec Collective member Murcof and Pepito, alongside a number of collaborations with female vocalists. It’s also a record that exhibits considerable stylistic shifts away from the sorts of sonic textures explored by Kobol on their 2005 debut album Broken Ebony, with the duo noticeably eschewing the glitchy textures of that aforementioned collection, in favour of a distinctly more smooth and polished overall aesthetic.
Ironically, it’s this newfound slickness that proves to present the biggest double-edged sword here, in many senses. The duo’s impressive opening reworking of Stateshirt’s “Straw Men’ certainly shows their heavily finessed approach to production beautifully paying off, with Chavez and Medina teasing seemingly endless new details out of the original source material’s vocals, acoustic guitars and drums, whilst imbuing proceedings with a sweeping yet digitally-fractured aesthetic that particularly calls to mind Telefon Tel Aviv’s more recent material. Kobol’ own “Submarino’ shows them similarly firing on all cylinders as haunting string motifs and plucked guitar strings are sent gliding over a broken backbone of spiky electronic rhythms, hollow percussive clangs and sonar-like electronic tones that hints at Four Tet’s metronomic repetition, while their stunning post-rock meets jazz-noir reworking of Murcof’s “Urano’ easily represents another high watermark here. While the majority of the instrumental tracks and remixes easily provide the strongest portion of the tracklisting here, the collaborations with female vocalists unfortunately come across as distinctly less memorable, the Jazz Del Mar-fronted “5PM’ in particular veering perilously close to tepid flamenco guitar-laced chill out.
Chris Downton
