It started back in 2009, when pianist and singer Yumi Hara and reeds player Geoff Leigh recorded "Upstream" and, around that time, met the latter’s former HENRY COW colleagues, bassist John Greaves and drummer Chris Cutler, at a festival. There and then, the four decided to form a quartet, but it’s only now that THE ARTAUD BEATS release their first studio album, “Logos,” after a few years of playing live and having their concerts captured on a very-limited-edition box set and CDRs. Yet it’s a completely fresh experiment, though, with not a lot of looking back to Canterbury scene – as if it’s shadows are escapable.
Says Yumi Hara:
“The music sounds new, it doesn’t resemble anything, there’s no nostalgia. I am very interested in creating unusual grooves – not simply ‘rhythm’ or ‘beats,’ but ‘grooves’ – and I’m so lucky to be able to work with Chris on those. I came up with a new idea of doing West African groove in 5/8+5/8 which, I believe, nobody else has ever done it before, and I explained it to Chris on the airplane on our way to Japan tour in 2013; he got it immediately, and we played it on the same night in Nagoya… Since then we kept doing that kind of stuff, and you can hear it on ‘Prefab Wreckage.’ You see, it is groove that matters to me, as it is different from straight 5/8+5/8.”
Logos
And here’s what the tracklist looks like:
1. Logos
2. Ipso Facto
3. Prefab Wreckage
4-6. Power / Once Around The Earth / The Floating Word
7. Per Se
8. E=mc2 (Bob Drake mix)
