King Papaya

Accordionist, keyboard player and multi– instrumentalist Koby Israelite has produced a CD of startling grotesquerie. A grim, obsessive figuration on cello, succeeded by flashes of jarring piano, launches into percussive patterns which abruptly exhaust themselves and are replaced by strange, menacing laughter, like the sound of a Punch and Judy man's swizzle. A series of spiky, distorted bagatelles follow, with simple yet quirky modal or chromatic melodies and snatches of speech or song briefly emerging from acoustic or electronically treated fogscapes, before vanishing again. There is something genuinely nightmarish about the music, and its bricolage suggests the disturbing thoughts and visions that creep into a mind on the edge of sleep.

Israelite draws on a number of styles, largely alluding to European folk or classical traditions, to form a patchwork which loosely illustrates scenes from a perplexing fable, the tale of King Papaya, told in full in the disc insert. Like the fable itself, the music is painted with a broad brush, and although the range of materials, ideas and instruments is impressive, some might feel the insistent use of a quirky melody over one sort of riff or another eventually begins to pall. Yet there is undeniably a powerful musical imagination and attitude at work here, with a dislocated, oblique take on European culture. The name of his record company SB is no random choice: here is something of the ancient terror awoken by the unpredictable, alien antics of the clown.