Monolith Cocktail Blog

ALBUM  REVIEW

Nillo & Sentidor And Friends    ‘SIBÖ Revisited’
(Sounds And Colours)

After creating an empirical third plane from the mystical atavistic chants of Costa Rica’s indigenous tribes and the contemporary sound of tropical bass and experimental electronica, Nillo & Sentidor, with an extended cast of congruous ‘friends’, revisit 2015’s original hallucinogenic SIBÖ. Inviting both diaphanous trance-like and equally trip-y reinterpretations of their work, Brazilian producer Sentidor (João Carvalho) and native Costa Rican musical ethnologist Nillo (Johnny Gutierrez) now expand their soundscape across the globe.

Originally built around the catalyst “spiritual guidance” of the Ngäbe tribe’s voices, the source material remains in some form or another throughout: either wafting in the background or gradually enervated to just a trace, yet always evocatively omnipresent. For the most part subtle and nuanced, tweaked with the signature touches of the contributors, this remix special is more like an extension of Nillo & Sentidor’s field studies.

One of the more harmonious of these reinterpretations, by the ‘Byzantine disco” remixer Zouyina (aka C Love), opens the album with a tropical soaked drift through the fauna version of ‘El Río’; resplendent with sucked backwards kinetic percussion and a wobbly South American sauntering beat. A possession of equally organic tracks follow, with an ancestral trek through the psychogeography undergrowth with Pigmaliaõ’s haunting Latin version of ‘Lamento del Chamen’, and the romantic string accompanied trip hop Wolf remix ‘Casa da Minha Alma’. Meanwhile, treading ever deeper, Chico Correa’s Gaia breakbeat reinvention of ‘Lune Noire’  meanders into ever stranger disjointed territories, and Sainte Vie’s Perspective merges minimalist electronica with the Future Sound Of London on the island’s outer body chorus of heavenly singing ‘Montanha’. It’s not until we reach Antigris’ warped cybernetic treatment of ‘El Viaje de Kamala’ that we hear the original material taken out of its comfort zone.  Antigris’ vision of Costa Rica is transformed into some mysterious alien subterranean; metallic rings echo as a feasting insect like creature scrabbles about in the gloom. The darkest rework on the album breaks the harmonious esoteric spirit of the jungle, sounding an ominous augur of not only the beauty but also the fear of the environment.

This is the most complimentary of returns to the original evocative and mystical SIBÖ soundscape, the global interaction adding a further layer of experimental sophistication. Certain themes, sounds and textures are extended, lifted or submerged with attentive ears, changing that source material just enough to become something new and refreshing. Harmonious with only the odd surprise, those who loved the 2015 collection of “electronic reinterpretations of the past” won’t be disappointed by this “revisit”.

Words:  Dominic Valvona