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KOOKEN & HOOMEN
Cafe du Nord | San Francisco | April 2002
Brian Mundy – guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion, vocals
Rob Gwin – keyboards, bass, vocals
Felipe Ceballos – drums and percussion
Nathan Germick – keyboards, vocals
Robyn Hartzell – slides and televisions, and t-shirt design
Kooken & Hoomen
is one of the more interesting bands to be making their way these days. This was in evidence during their Tuesday tenure at the Cafe du Nord over the last few weeks of April. K&H, a local SF band with roots stretching from the Midwest to South America, is at that precious stage of development when their fans aren’t yet able to explain why they like them, and so therefore cannot hold them to a set expectation. But there are fans and the band's music has grown in confidence with this realization. From their earlier days, which often featured playing reminiscent of skilled artists making line sketches of what would be much more elaborate images, the bands sound has gotten fuller and stronger and spends less time searching and more time driving. As the saying goes, the band is finding its voice.
The K&H sound is difficult for me to describe. It is electronic but, in a very real sense, organic. To me it feels like an intentional effort on the part of the band to recreate a world in which the same is true. We are individuals trying to be real in an electronic world and K&H are attempting to document this. Many of the sounds have an industrial feel, the feel of a world in motion, the gears moving the bodies along. This manifests in the way each band member plays distinctly apart from the others, with one part rising while another ebbs, and this process continues until eventually each part lines up in place and the band launches forward together.
Continuing with the organic/electronic idea, there is the subject of the visual component of the show. K&H is a multimedia band. In every show there are elements of painting, photography and theater. Visually, the organic/electronic synthesis comes across most directly in the slide show and the fun, and funny, televisions which dot the stage. The slides which provide the backdrop for the band are extremely varied in their content, but do tend to focus on the scientific. There are medical slides, and slides of stars and planets, but these are not the slides of John’s Hopkins and NASA; rather, they are the stuff of low budget films like “The American Astronaut” and Mexican med schools. The TVs... well, I cannot assume you know about the TVs yet, but they are a staple at Kooken & Hoomen shows. Part of the band's stage set up includes the presence of anywhere from three to seven of them, each painted with some of the amusing images which artist Robyn Hartzell possesses in her clever head, and these images are then set alight and sometimes seemingly afoot by the static from the unreceptive TVs. With both the slide show and televisions there is, again, the acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of technology, though it has been claimed as art and diminished by good will and humor.
While I don’t want to go on with this art and technology stuff too long, I can’t help myself. It is how I see this band. It’s how I make sense of their music. It isn’t that the band does not rock: these boys tear it up. But it is a very conscious and controlled tearing up of things. While the “jambands” I tend to listen to (Phil, Panic, The Dead) seem to do whatever they can to rip through the canvas they start their creation on, Kooken & Hoomen stays very much within the borders, painting intricate details and concentrating on a specific evocation. Each song has a distinct character, and the band stays in character and uses this as the basis for their improvisations.
Each of the three nights at the Cafe du Nord had, as its theme, a different primary color: Red, Blue and Yellow. The band dressed accordingly and asked the same of their fans, many of whom showed up in the appropriate attire. Each night featured songs that fit the character of the chosen color. This produced three very distinct shows. Each night was a construction, an attempt to create something more than a musical set. Each night had the feeling of a theater piece inclusive of all who wanted to be a part, and the numerous guest artists who took part in the shows added to this feeling.
Reading all this, you still might not have a clue what this band sounds like, and that’s all right. To describe a band as a particular thing seems to me an aggressive act. Kooken & Hoomen sounds like they want to sound like. Ha! I know that’s more vague than even the vagaries above, but that is the most attractive aspect of the band to me. They are up there making interesting choices and creating interesting music that has the effect of putting interesting thoughts in your head and rhythms in your hips and feet. Besides, to describe what the band sounds like now is like raking your deck in autumn: as soon as you think you’ve got it all cleared, there’s another leaf falling.
Kooken & Hoomen is a band in motion. Since self-producing their first album, Escuela, over a year ago, K&H have developed enough new material that they didn’t play a single repeat at their three show run. Among these new songs are some of their most crowd pleasing tunes to date: “The Drip”, which features guitarist Brian Mundy on bass; and the insanely amusing dance number “Amphibian”, which features keyboard player Nathan Germick in frog mask, boasting of what he can do with his ten foot tongue.
If you haven’t seen Kooken & Hoomen before, go ahead and check them out. If you have seen them, why would you want to stop now? This is a confident band with talent and intelligence behind each instrument, a band that creates not just music but experience, and not to be forgotten a band that has a sense of humor so that none of this wacky art stuff gets carried too far.
Kooken & Hoomen's next show is May 8 at the Boom Boom Room in SF, and will feature three sets!
David Friedman
JamBase | San Francisco
Go see live music!
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