Organized Anarchy in OOIOO’s Nijimusi

on Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne

What are we looking for when we listen to new music? What is most important? It’s not so much that each and every musical experience has to be formally groundbreaking and utterly unlike anything that has come before, though that rare occurrence certainly does help. Really, we’re talking about the same thing we ask of pop music or jazz or anything else, which is the element of surprise — surprise at how our assumptions about what music is and ought to be get a hefty boot in the booty; surprise at how our own pretensions toward being in whatever kind of vanguard get challenged, how we are forced to question our own orthodoxies, our own ways of breaking the rules.

There is very little that is not surprising about OOIOO. The Japanese four-piece began as a fictitious band for a photo shoot for a magazine in 1996. When the group’s leader Yoshimi was asked to do a photo shoot for a magazine, she invited a few of her friends to join her and created for the shoot a fake band called OOIOO — which they later decided to make real. It was a bit like how the Monkees became a real and quite good band, or how the hoary story about punk bands goes, this brazen assertion that perhaps music can be created by people who aren’t “real” musicians, and that their unconventional musical views (and often limited technical abilities) can shake things up big-time. YoshimiO, as she currently calls herself, is a drummer/singer/trumpeter best known for her percussion prowess in Japan’s…