Review: Jum-Jum – Ways and Waves (Utrovortu, Feb 17)

Water surrounds us. It’s our constant companion and the biggest part of us. It’s in human veins, in tears, in wet air in the lungs, flows like continuous river from our birth to death. And so it is in outer world, where water has its own life in many cycles. Water vapors and clouds transform to rain drops, gather in tiny brooks and then in wide loud streams. Groundwater faces the surface by million murmuring springs. World ocean holds planet Earth in a tremendous and caring embrace.

I’ve been doing a lot of quoting in reviews lately. Sometimes, as I’ve said in the past, it’s because the artist, label, or fellow listener has captured my own thoughts perfectly (see being there). Other times it’s just that the copy is so good it would be an injustice not to reprint it (see Performance Outrage Enhancement). And then every so often the text begins a conversation that I feel compelled to continue, a phenomenon of which the translated Russian introduction to Jum-Jum’s Ways and Waves is a remarkable incidence. Because what makes this 42-minute single track so utterly gorgeous is not the sublime overtones and harmonies woven by twirling, fluid drones, not the warm bed of synth ambience that feels like a full-body hug, but the fact that the sound of water itself is the most prevalent and consistent presence throughout. Soft, cleansing raindrops pool on and drip off of all the corrugated metal roofs in your brain; bubbling brooks wash away the encrusted mud of exhaustion and despair; damp subterranean caverns quieting and cooling the noise and heat of being—“our constant companion” indeed.