Kaboom Karavan
Short Walk with Olaf
Umor Rex 2007

01. Romans
02. Karavanserai
03. Toambertree [Remix]
04. Short Walk with Olaf
05. No More Karavan
06. Roadmap
07. Laws, Fools & Anagrams
08. Resolut

Gonna keep my promise and take off for several days, away from town and into open country. Somewhere between sleep and packing, I've still managed finding time for the Umor Rex website, which, frankly, almost cancelled all my plans. If Short Walk with Olaf is any indication of their general output, I'll have long nights downloading the entire catalog when I return. Because Umor Rex is a netlabel and, naturally, gives all "for free". And, to trust my eyes/nose, it's more than your average heroes who just won't get proper record deals. Case in point with project Kaboom Karavan, whose artistic value exceeds many luxurious ones', thanks to a series of well-placed good ideas. No joke, these guys can make some lovely interesting music and their album is chock full of it. What I mean is that it sums up instrumental virtuosity, synthetic lushness, harmonic detours and rhythmic outbreaks, yet everything's been cooked following special recipes - vague but still distinct.

Maybe the best word to describe this music is subtle. It's music in which tiny gestures carry great weight. It's music in which transitions - those spaces between events - are as important as the events themselves. And that's what makes it so seductive - there are no big hooks or gaudy melodies to distract you from the whole. Like a mandala - you can enter it from any point, and every point is just a means of getting from one place to another.

Available here, along with 27 other titles. Each of them zipped, with nice instructions for the cover prints, in case you'd wanna burn to CD. Let's keep the message simple: start downloading. Will be back later in the weekend, to investigate results.