Reviews RACD107
I hardly think that you kick JONO EL GRANDE too close when you praise or scold your music as zappaesk. From the start of the new smorgasbord The Choko King (RACD107), the spirit of good Frank has been present in a devilish manner. There are 29 tracks, 19/29 of them shorter than one and a half minutes, 8/29 softer than a 3-minute egg. No. 28, the metazappaesque 'Big Ben Dover' with head vocals and Ruth-Underwood-Vibes, touches the 4-minute mark. Only the final 'Vital Requiem Complete' breaks the mold as a suite of just under a quarter of an hour. The cover art comes from Jonos Landsmann Christer Karlstad, a neorealist known for his surreal and fairytale curiosities. Not only with 'paw porridge' with his German lyrics Jonos and Karlstad's imagination fit together like egg and egg cup. With all the polystylistics and colorfulness of the musical ideas, Jonos Humpty Dumpty seems to me more and more as if it made no significant difference whether he was perched unharmed on the wall or lay splintered on the floor. The splintery, fragmentary, is one of its manifestations, so to speak, and on closer inspection neither its royal nature nor its dancing tendencies suffer. 'Eve's Horse Dance' is followed by a 'Tango Dob' zanga ', the' Twelve Finger International Tango ', a' Utopian Dance 'and the' Dance Of The Skin-Eating Witch '. Alles jonoeske Helterskeltering is a reference to the unabashed artistry of Zappa at his best & weirdest - Uncle Meat, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Läther, The Yellow Shark ... The lively and cheeky requiem celebrates nothing less than Zappa's immortality in its jerking wildness and with over-the-top vocal antics. Zappa is just a name for maximum musical wit, just an egg from the many that a brave hand between Baba Yaga's chicken legs could pick up.
Bad Alchemy (DE)
The larger-than-life, yet incredibly childish leftover and sausage machine Jono El Grande was started again, albeit retrospectively. The big Jono scrambles over into the children's room and reaches with both hands into the music box standing there. There is nothing like home recordings, sample tapes, live and studio recordings. Jono is happy, throwing the toy around indiscriminately. Hooray, it's snowing! Herb and beets fly low. For example, when Jono El Grande pours the Zappa with Dixieland. But not only then. He unearthed no fewer than 29 miniatures for "The Choko King". In total, they make up the soundtrack to imaginary Czech cartoons and / or computer games from the year Snow. And in between there are really touching scenes in the nursery. Now don't lose your temper! Damn it, too late. Ah, there's a 14-minute bonus track around there. Very funny. Irritatingly infantile. The chocolate king, he lives high
Freestyle (AT)
He obviously likes Frank Zappa, Cpt. Beefheart and Art Rock in general: The Norwegian Jono El Grande is a self-taught jack of all trades. His music is lively, playful, daring, surprising - and to get a rating: very great. "The Choko King" gathers pieces from 1995 to 2008, including the quarter-hour "Vital Requiem".
Choices (DE)
Hooting, honking dadaist avant-something skronk from the Norwegian composer, band leader, guitarist, artist and dancing conductor. Imagine the soundtrack to a roadtrip with Hunter S. Thompson getting Moondog and Frank Zappa blasted in the back and battling over the stereo, and you've got almost got a whiff of the sound on 'The Choko King'. It's Jono's third album since 2009, but the 29 surreal recordings, marked by titles such as 'The Lobotomized Healers Rise And Fall' and 'Twelve Finger Intestinal Tango' were made between 1995 and 2008, includes some material predating his debut album by at least four years, and tracks which were even too mad for the other releases, culled from demos, rehearsal tapes, live and studio recordings. However they're evidently not redundant (well, OK,
Boomkat (UK)