I would have been remiss if I didn’t write something about this album. I’ve listened to largely nothing but IC-02 Bogotá through the week. For the weeks leading up to the album’s release, I interspersed two or three days of music by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

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It always starts the same; first with a song, then an album, then the whole discography from Ruban Nielson’s wildly successful transmutation of lo-fi sleaze, acidic funk and ambient jazz called Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

However, something I have not done for a while is indulge the laboratory experiments that are Nielson’s SB and IC series. To my recollection, Nielson has never clarified what the IC designation stands for, so I’m just going to make it up as I go.

The basics are this: the Instrumental Canon has always been a distant idea of a series. It has nowhere near the same regularity as the SB series, which also has no official designation, but has always operated as a New Year’s tiding cobbled together from bits and bobs laying around Nielson’s studio. It is the closest offering to the original impetus of Unknown Mortal Orchestra; the underground musings of a mad scientist.

The International Compositions series, in turn, is the recognition that what was a solo project has become a family affair, a musicality percolated from a jazz patriarch, brewed within the punk scene of Auckland, New Zealand then stored and fermented in the basement of a Portland, Oregon home before maturing in cities the world over.

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Album Details

IC-02 Bogotá
Producer: Ruban Nielson
Label: Jagjaguwar
Genre: Indie Rock, Acid Jazz, Worldbeat
Tracklist:

1. “Earth 1”
2. “Earth 2”
3. “Earth 3”
4. “Earth 5”
5. “Heaven 7”
6. “Underworld 1”
7. “Underworld 4”
8. “Underworld 6”

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First came IC-01 Hanoi and now comes IC-02 Bogotá. Just as its predecessor did, Bogotá starts and ends in media res, with a drum circle that would tremble and thrum on the sidewalks of the Colombian capital and denote that your arrival and departure are one in the same.

They bookend the album’s two halves, existing in the ambient spaces, developing a sonic sympatico with every tropicália and Clube das Esquinas album I’ve ever heard. The musical geography might be slightly off there—both tropicália and Clube das Esquinas are Brazillian movements whereas Colombia’s heritage lays in the music and dance of cumbia—but it is the most precise way I can describe how the tropical thread started in Hanoi continues on Bogotá.

This album reflects a musicality that juxtaposes two different jungles united by a singular humidity. One that perspires and collects on everything from the trunk of a rubber tree to the concrete face of a skyscraper. Therein lies the germination of a five-man orchestra jungling through South America.

The radio may not drink it, but for the sonic adventurer, it is the milk of a jazz yagé. The locality may be specific, but the understanding is immediate to anyone who has been a stranger in a strange land. Imbibe in the psychotropic, and one can do so from home.

There are moments when the recordings touch a level of freedom that speaks to standing on the corner, but not the incorrigibility. Keyboardist Christian Li reminds everyone that the rhythm can, in fact, host a melody and everything soon jogs into action for “Earth 2.”

The tracks sounds like a sonic holdover from V, featuring chucking rhythm guitar, waterlogged bass and a trio of synths from Jake Portrait and Chris and Kody Nielson (pops and brother, respectively). These synth lines criss-cross like the vines of a six-minute bridge built from the branches of the canopy.

From Nielson’s architectural prowess, he can let Pops Nielson sashay the streets with his native saxophone on “Earth 3” then pull it all back for another digital disco on “Earth 5.”

Were this any other project, Nielson likely could have stopped there. Four tracks at just a hair over thirty minutes would have fallen perfectly in line with the prior edition’s own 28-minute runtime.

But seven years is a long time to go between Improvised Configurations, and that was just the day side. After a slight interlude in “Heaven 7,” the band continues to plumb and search and stretch every ounce of whatever juice they found on their groovy daytrip to the liminal spaces of the avant garde night. In doing so, they stumble into the city for the second half of the record. There department store muzak and mallrat ambient plays as they haunt an urban shopping center.

Close my eyes and I hear the neon creep of signs humming to a night sky bleached of all stars. I see the shadows standing by the pavilion. I count the countless cigarette butts dead in the gutter. I shiver for the wind, but not for the cold. Even in the stillest of frames, I shake with the smallest quake of an animator’s hand.

This is how the Independent Commissions make sense to me. They are clues, clues and whispers of a vision, of a search to find music like life. Life is not always a constant of movement, nor a symphony of action. Sometimes it is a cacophony of not-quite-silence, a tremolo of tranquil branches rustled by a passing breeze.

The melodies to this movement of non-movement are tubular and twinkling, synthesizing and shining, soft lights, pale lights, solemn lights, fleeting and flickering. Fragments of gold wrapper dreams and sidewalk visions are overlaid on insomniac episodes that beat the head like a drum circle.

I see this vision every night from the corner of my street. I see it every time I hear this record. In the modern international, the music of Bogotá still finds life in Portland.

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