Blop, blop: Five essential zolo artists you need to hear
Among the likes of Simpsonswave and goblincore, a perusal across the more intrepid corners of Bandcamp will have likely resulted in the fringe genre tag of zolo during the weird movement’s peak.
Even assigned zoloers couldn’t really tell you its exact definition, but it’s a microgenre that sounds exactly like its typical album artwork and stage shows. Attached to the zolo tags was often the garishly alien artwork of Ben Mendelewicz‘s work for New York’s Hoard Records cohort, a cartoonish arrest of gunked surrealism that felt like two alien fingers plunged into your eyeballs, twisting around several times to ensure maximum brain jabbing before extending its slimy, elongated tongue to lick the grey matter and ocular fluid off its many digits.
Has that made things any clearer? Well, think The Residents’ atonal honk, Devo’s synth fizz, and Oingo Boingo’s hyperactive cabaret electronically wobbling like the orange Nickelodeon globular logo from the 1990s. Then there’s the raid of the dressing-box. Taking cues from early Split Enz and the Cardiacs, the zolo bunch would hide behind a Dada costume of zingy absurdity and chunky, geometric patterns, not too dissimilar to the ZoLO toys the genre name was possibly derived from.
It’s gloriously mad, in short. With the recent Angine de Poitrine album having piqued an interest in their orbiting plane of polka-dotted avant-garde, we brave the deeper recesses of Bandcamp’s illuminous, weird fish seabed and pick out the five zolo-makers you need in your experimental playlist. Buckle up, it’s gonna get odd.
Five essential zolo artists you need to hear now:
Modal Zork
Zolo is a fairly urgent sensibility in the synth and punk world, concerned with its ephemeral abstraction, flickering and fuzzing for your attention. Modal Zork dares to weave a narrative scope to his work, however. One listen to 2018’s Oba Gooba of Gort Nork swells with a teeming cast of unknown characters, a swampy broth of Scarryesque busyness that communicates in its own comic language but feels tethered to somewhere sincere.
The work of Portland, Oregon’s Joe Nanez, Modal Zork dwells in classic zolo ‘blop, blop’ drip of thick, plasticated synths and feverish psychedelia, but, while never knowing the characters you’ve encountered and neighbourhoods you’ve hurtled around, you know some kind of story has just unfolded in any one of Nanez’s invites to the land of Zork.
The Oblong Boys
Formed as early as 1999 and sharing a key slice of zolo burnish along with our later entry, Texas’ The Oblong Boys wielded their keyboards with extraterrestrial bite; they didn’t sound or look like anything else at the time. The Devo ingredients radiate palpably as would bind the zolo energy, but a greater twist of Pat A Physics’ erratic vocals and the twinned collision of their “Rayonist” and “Gadabout” synths thrust cuts like ‘Sassquatch’ and ‘Rip Your Head Off’ to foundational gems of the incipient zolo.
Avoiding the masks but typically taking the stage in tall, cardboard costumes, their sole LP, Pizzazarama Universe, in 2003 still stands as a landmark zolo document over 20 years later, its weirdness rendered all the more gobsmacking considering just how unaccustomed even the underground music fan was when first exposed to their oddball synth attack in the Austin clubs.
Cabo Boing
Sometimes, you just wanna open up an artist’s psyche and scrutinise the strange foibles and idiosyncrasies that pepper their grey matter’s terrain. Cabo Boing’s a case in point. The nom de plume of Brian Esser, the electronic rubber stretched and elasticated like a piece of unruly synthetic foam, all seemed thematically obsessed with clowns and gelatinous entities that erratically stick to Cabo Boings lyrical canvas.
His songs are a joy to say for their phonetic taste alone, ‘Blob On a Grid’ or ‘Torim Pluk’, the signs and streetnames of Cabo Boing’s weird world. Molten and mishappen but wrapped around an electronic skeleton full of angular jabs, Cabo Boing and his yellow squid mask might well stand as the perfect, smirking beckoner for the zolo virgin.
Yip-Yip
Before Cabo Boing, Brian Esser was the Yip 1 to Jason Temple’s Yip 2, the foundational duo that pretty much cemented and pioneered the zolo look and sound as is best understood today, back in 2001. Fuelled by a shared love of ska and Atom and His Package, Florida’s Yip-Yip would find a novel way of circumventing stage fright by pushing a spiky theatrical front to their discombobulated electronic attack.
There’s a heady brew at Yip-Yip’s sonic core. Like a detuned radio station of garbled TV, chintzy hip-hop can just as easily rear its mutoid head as trashy techno, serrated jungle, or 16-bit waltzes. Anything could happen in the Yip-Yip world until 2012, when the two decided to call it quits after Bone Up.
Macula Dog
Mendelewicz wasn’t just content with lending his oozing artwork to Haord’s distinctly warped aesthetic. Joining forces with Matt Cutler in 2015, the congealed multi-media, electronic zap of Macula Dog presented a fully wriggling gesamtkunstwerk across their albums, videos, and stage shows, all surrealist props and artful mannequin use set against their topsy-turvy electronic splatter.
Conjuring “convulted loops”, the intricate density of samples and synths on Breezy and Orange 2 surge with confounding cheer, all teeming with off-kilter irregularities amid its complex whirlwind but still managing to wrestle some semblance of a hook. Still going, Macula Dog’s last tour presented their most impressive clobber yet, white Hazmat-style suits that featured their hardware affixed like cyber appendages.
