Where does Kilimanjaro end and Mount Fuji begin? Geographically speaking, that question is obviously absurd, but in relation to the Darkjazz Ensemble of one and the Doomjazz Corporation of the other, the relationship is more complex.
Beginning in the mid-noughties, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble – a group with shifting membership but focused around bassist Jason Köhnen and beatsmith Gideon Kiers – began to put out a series of releases that leaned hard into a soundworld partly adjacent to that of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks. In this world, revealed on their self-titled debut in 2006, patterns cycled hypnotically, eerily combining tones of claustrophobia and reverie; beats crunched and pounded, only to pull away to something more shufflingly benign; pitches yawned and stretched, while drones arched and contorted into basslines. The result was a complex melange: solemn yet playful, sinister and nightmarish yet dreamy and strangely upbeat, yet always coloured with a poignant patina of melancholy.
The relatively short-form output of TKDE was supplemented by their parallel guise, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, where the group explored larger-scale, more improvisational ideas. Beginning in 2007 with Doomjazz Future Corpses!, they demonstrated just how far they were prepared to go. Where the debut album had been relatively accessible, with familiar sonic elements, this was much more remote and challenging, presented as nameless track-length divisions of what was clearly a single, 70-minute span. The fact TKDE and TMFDC were siblings was just about obvious, yet in many ways they felt worlds apart. Where one was ‘darkjazz’, with emphasis on the jazz, the other was ‘doomjazz’, with emphasis on the doom. One could almost be relaxed to, the other seemed to be accompanying an apocalypse.
Their output continued for around seven years. As TKDE they put out a fabulous EP combining past reworkings and future ideas, Mutations (2009), followed by three more albums, Here Be Dragons (2009), the crowd-funded From the Stairwell (2011) and I Forsee the Dark Ahead, If I Stay (2011), ending (somewhat anticlimactically) in 2013 with an EP exploring remixes of a single track, Xtabay. As TMFDC they released a further quartet of albums showcasing their large-scale ambition, Succubus (2009), Anthropomorphic (2011), Egor (2012) and finally – this time ending with the most majestic of climaxes – 2013’s Live at Roadburn. Whereupon everything stopped, the group members dispersed, the darkness lightened and the doom faded.
From my perspective, it’s been a very long silence. My appreciation and love for these releases has grown steadily over the years. Many of them are in my at-the-time or updated Best Albums of the Year lists, with Anthropomorphic coming top in 2011 (5:4 didn’t properly exist in 2007, but if it had i’ve no doubt that Doomjazz Future Corpses! would have topped that year’s list). That silence was emphatically ended last Friday night at the Lido in Berlin, where both iterations of the group reformed for a one-off reunion concert.
The event was structured in two one-hour sets, separated by a 30-minute break. i’d wondered beforehand whether the two parts would be assigned to TKDE and TMFDC respectively, but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, we were treated to something more structurally ambiguous, moving freely back and forth between shorter and longer senses of scope. Both manifestations of the group comprised five original group members: guitarist Eelco Bosman, vocalist Charlotte Cegarra, Gideon Kiers on beats and electronics, trombonist Hilary Jeffery, and Jason Köhnen on bass.
Happily, their performance was not simply a trip down memory lane. They opened with ‘The Nothing Changes’ (the first track on their first album), which was arguably the perfect way to begin, easing us all back into their unique soundworld. But what followed was stylistically and aesthetically fluid, and in ways that went beyond what one might have been expecting.
There were distinct qualities of sludge earlier in part 1, and some extended sequences where the group simply allowed the atmosphere they’d create to sit and stew, placing various sonic objects within it, introducing a more palpable (dark) ambient aspect than tends to feature in their output (Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II had been playing in Lido before the gig began; perhaps this was a hint). Trip hop elements were subtly woven into the texture at times, and while the sound system in Lido was typically problematic (do any clubs have a genuinely worthy sound setup anymore?), befuddling the mid-range especially, the noirish, Lynchian soundworld they created was powerfully enveloping.
Part 2 went further, in both directions. First, it was bouncier; neither TKDE nor TMFDC have ever released music you can really dance to, but the shuffling beats had enough punch and momentum – particularly in what sounded like a more souped-up version of the Mutations track ‘München’ – for the more eager members of the audience to muster up the makings of some moves. But that’s really not what this part was about. Whatever iteration of the group we ascribe things to, the performance went from darkness to doom, beyond merely nightmarish, climaxing in an extended onslaught of the most glorious overload. This tapped straight back into the heart of what’s always made their music so magical, invoking profound melancholy with such total sonic majesty. If the world ever does end, it couldn’t do it any better than this. And as if this doomcore finale wasn’t enough, for an encore the lights blazed directly at us as the group (unexpectedly joined by trombonist Miodrag Gladovic) conjured up a supercharged, coruscating wall of pitch and noise, pure and abrasive simultaneously, as if light and dark had fused into something entirely new.
Only a few words were said at the end, by Charlotte Cegarra, who, looking a bit overwhelmed at the immense audience reaction, referred to “music we made in the past, the music we’ve made now, and the music we’ll make in the future…” – at which point Lido erupted with cheers and applause. Who knows what, if anything, might come next – but whatever, whenever, it’ll definitely be worth the wait.
