Avalanche Kaito – ‘Talitakum’ album review: Burkinabe griot and noise punk collide
THE SKINNY: Some records ease you in, but not Talitakum—Talitakum kicks off with what sounds like an army of malfunctioning scooter horns. If you survive that barrage, still intrigued, then a journey awaits you. Avalanche Kaito, consisting of Burkinabe griot legend Kaito Winse and Belgian industrial duo Nico Gitto and Benjamin Chaval, create mercurial music that grabs you by the hand and leads you to some swirling metropolis underworld.
Bass notes burst through the bustle with a filmic sense of darkness, constant percussion, and horns create a wild yet shrouded busyness like a Koh San Road sidestreet at two in the morning, and then Winse himself drops in and out in manic bursts of human expression. The album is a constant whirlwind of uncompromising noise, cleverly constructed by three experts clearly enthused by their own creation.
This is the trio’s second album, but, if anything, the whole thing almost feels fresher and more unexpected than the first. It feels as though now they have gotten to know each other – to use the horrid parlance of our times – they can ‘match each other’s weirdness’. The result is an epic cavalcade of noise that only these three men could’ve possibly made.
Everything about the record feels frenzied and dramatic, masking the careful consideration that has gone into making it sound that way. Such bustle and immediacy are no happy accident; they come from years of playing live and channelling that sense of mastery into the studio. At times, you even lose sight of Avalanche Kaito and the notion of instrumentation—rather than your ear-bending to decipher an oboe from a tuba, you’re lost in the cinematic sense of imagery the album whisks up.
From feeling like a spy outside of your comfort zone hurled into a nightclub in Lagos in subtle pursuit of a shadowy ringleader to sudden meditations on the work of Francisco Goya, this polyrhythmic assault course is a textural masterstroke that never gets you enough time to stop and mull over the music before hurling your mind into the next buzzing scene. That fizzing sense of imagery gives Talitakum an oddly prescient feeling, not least because it is a futurist genre all of its own but also because it amplifies the gushing water spigot of the modern world in a way that feels thrilling and foreboding in equal measure.
For fans of: Navigating traffic jams in central Hanoi. The brutalist tongue-crushing full flavour of extra hot lime pickle.
A concluding comment from a migraine specialist: Initial tests have proven that this album can both cause and cure migraines in an instant—a perplexing scientific result that means this racket requires further tests.
Release Date: April 12th | Producer: Benjamin Chaval | Label: Glitterbeat
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