toso toso – toso toso

Essentially a wide-ranging supergroup of left-field solo acts from across a plethora of musical forms as classical pianists sit beside sound designers and improvisational vocalists, toso toso forge these disparate crafts into something dense, emotional and properly distinctive on their self-titled debut album.

Opener cLAcLAcLA serves as a microcosm of the record; bounding out in a flurry of micro-sampled chaos, like the contents of your cutlery drawer flung into the washing machine, but as quickly as it’s emerged it has mutated into sweeping bombastic soul baring, elevated by isabel crespo pardo’s soaring vocal runs. It should rupture the track, make it feel too Jekyll and Hyde, but Kabir Adhiya-Kumar’s crackling drumming makes it feel of a piece, like the central section is trying to channel the unconscious chaos felt in the eruptions of noise. It’s these kind of details that run through the record and make it pulse with life.

The record’s primary tone is this; lush and emotive but always teetering on the verge of tearing itself inside out. It’s as if they’ve stumbled on a trove of Come to My Garden outtakes that have in the intervening years become possessed; a push-pull between leaning into the sublime and cannibalising it. Even the more straightforward tracks like the ascending synth ambience of arrastro los pies seems to be emanating from some primordial sludge. This tension makes for a thrilling debut.

Listen to: cLAcLAcLA, corre que corre, arrastro los pies