O Yama O return with their first full length LP since 2018’s self titled debut. Galo finds the duo of sculptor Rie Nakajima and vocalist Keiko Yamamoto firmly enmeshed alongside percussionist Marie Roux and violin player and visual artist Billy Steiger as a band, their project this time a proper four way entanglement - or five when you include the record’s powerhouse producer David Cunningham.
Known perhaps already for their exploration of folkloric Japan and the ‘domestic and democratic quality of everyday life’, part of the magic of O Yama O comes from the conjuring of atmospheres from the smallest of elements. On Galo, Nakajima’s object orchestra is accompanied by bird callers, kalimbas, the koto, a Pierre Berthet ‘sounding hat’, and one of those plastic whirly tubes which produce a surprisingly agreeable warbling, especially in the hands of Roux. Together their sound recalls the far out sonorities of Anton Bruhin’s Vom Goldabfischer, (also a fan of a PVC tube, which he fixed with a reed and called a ch-pon), and maps out a hopeful landscape for genuinely experimental folk music; a slippery exploration of customs, routines, storytelling and disparate influences.
The sketches of O Yama O’s earlier work arrive on Galo as tunes rich with melody, alongside the occasional song - fleshed out, but totally surreal - forming as naturally as a cloud and dispersing fresh clarity next morning. Though miraculously recorded in multiple parts and online between London, Devon, Luzern and Fukouka, Galo has a fair view of Albion at its window. The recorder and violin led ‘Harvest Dance’ draws from Weird Walk material, though Steiger’s folk melody and Cunningham’s production are anything but purely bucolic. Perhaps it’s this that makes us think of folk music. Or maybe it’s the group's particular language, which seems at once familiar and yet also totally alien. Yamamoto says of the group’s practice that “listening becomes talking, talking becomes hearing, hearing becomes singing, singing becomes silence and silence becomes sculpture." It’s a simple process, yet rich with reward - a searching kind of structure which finds room for each listener.
