Tuxedomoon Vapour Trails
Tuxedomoon–a 30-year-old collective originally formed in San Francisco but heavily associated with Brussels, Belgium–embodies a […]
Tuxedomoon–a 30-year-old collective originally formed in San Francisco but heavily associated with Brussels, Belgium–embodies a caliginous cabaret, soundtracking spaghetti westerns as if re-conceived in the bleary halftones of late-’70s Berlin. Initially contemporaries of Devo, Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu, and The Residents, this quartet fuses disassociated electro-acoustics and jazz spin-offs into a concrete sense of obscurity. These eight tracks continue that impressionistic legacy of navigating filmic plumes, offering smoldering tones of murk and mystique (brooding skronk and muggy transients that zoom from womb to tomb, so to speak). Simultaneously thickening and muting sax, strings, pianos, and ambient electronics coalesce to make tracks such as “Big Olive” and “Dizzy” slough through no wave, mutant disco, and free jazz, while leaning on none.