IROIRO

It only took a few gigs for IROIRO to establish themselves as Seattle's most exciting rock group. This may surprise fans of IQU, whose Michiko Swiggs and Kento Oiwa form IROIRO's creative core. Whereas IQU combined samples and live instrumentation to put playful spins on trip-hop, drum & bass, and synth-pop, IROIRO produce extended, vocal-free jams that blossom into powerful psychedelic rock. You can hear the band's rapid, splendid evolution on their self-titled debut album, recorded in the '70s room at Avast! with Stuart Hallerman and mixed with vintage equipment.

Like another Seattle artist, Shabazz Palaces, IROIRO came back from an extended hiatus to create their most adventurous music. In the aftermath of early-'20s IQU reunion gigs and the disbanding of synth sorceress Swiggs and drummer Justin Schwartz's electronic unit Zazaz, they asked Oiwa to join them in a new project. Kento—who'd been involved in Malaise, his outlet for guitar and Theremin improvisation—agreed. They assembled for Friday night sessions at which the trio combined Zazaz's “man-machine methods” (fusing live drumming with drum machine with synth sequences) and Malaise's spontaneous noise excursions. The resulting single and album will convince you that rock still has ingenuity to burn.

“We would spend hours finding grooves and making crazy noises with the synths/guitar/Theremin,” Swiggs recalled. “We would sit around for hours and make sounds that we weren’t hearing from other music, or taking small inspirations from performances we liked and throwing them in.” James Drage—formerly of SIL2K—joined the sessions and his effected bass sounds were, says Swiggs, “amazing and otherworldly. He was the perfect piece that we were missing in the band.”

Influenced by the industrial spaces and creatures surrounding their practice space, IROIRO also find inspiration in Balinese gamelan. “There is no beginning, there is no end [to this music],” Swiggs explains. “It is a part of nature and nature informs it.” Drage also credits the impact of artist Yayoi Kusama's “colorful mirrored spaces.” This predilection for the infinite plus a fondness for free-flowing creation fuel IROIRO's recordings.

Swiggs notes “Every song was recorded in one go and we would pick the take with the best feel and performance. There was minimal editing and some overdubs. The recording and mixing is not 'perfect' and there is a human-ness to the recording.”

IROIRO's debut single gives you the feeling that anything's possible. The loping, chiming rock of “Once” morphs into an elegantly distorted whorl that'll make fans of Creation-era Swervedriver swoon. “Formosa” boasts arena-rock swagger tempered by artfully noisy, psychedelic sensibilities and a wistful tunefulness. IROIRO understand that beauty paradoxically intensifies when chaos enters the frame.

That principle also applies to their album. With its four songs averaging nearly 10 minutes, IROIRO specialize in compositions that gain intensity as they progress. An easygoing chugger with a winsome melody and Theremin melisma, “Nanashi” is suffused with a gentle euphoria that eventually gets subsumed by tumult. “This is the most 'pop' of all of our songs,” Swiggs says. “I was inspired by Ulrich Schnauss for the sequence and bass line.” Influenced by Brian Eno, “I Didn't I Will” has the feeling of an inexorable ascent toward enlightenment. “Cool Man Sicks” has a similar processional motion, but is more understated and metronomic, like a measured take on Can's “Mother Sky.” You can imagine this scoring the climactic scene of an art-house thriller. Swiggs notes, “Kento wanted a longer song with no chord changes so that we could really explore the groove.” Inspired by a New Mexico mountain Kento visited, “Sandia” starts like a soulful, Spiritualized meditation before exploding into towers of fizzing guitars, then returning to calm. Michiko calls it “subtle and over the top at the same time”—an apt description of IROIRO's astonishing music.