April 18 - 25, 1 9 9 6

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Chow fun

Cibo Matto offer a compelling sonic menu

by Matt Ashare

["Cibo Back in the early days of glasnost, a group of American doctors traveled to what was then the Soviet Union for a conference on mental health. Now, anyone even remotely familiar with the legacy of brutal repression that tainted Soviet psychiatry will understand that this symposium constituted of a meeting of ambassadors from two radically different worlds. I heard about the event from one of the participating psychiatrists a few months later. And the one anecdote he related that stuck with me concerned a lecture that one of his colleagues delivered on eating disorders -- a subject that's become a lucrative staple of the American talk-show circuit but one that seemed to make little or no impression on the Soviet psychiatrists gathered at the conference. Apparently, the American psychiatrists reasoned, food in the Soviet Union was simply not available in the quantities or varieties that would support the proliferation of eating disorders.

Here in the US, despite those curtailments that the Republican Congress has tried to place on welfare programs, we still live in a society consumed by the plentiful rainbow-assortment food products it consumes, both literally ("Mad Cow Disease," e-coli, heart disease, etc. . . .) and figuratively (obsessive dieting, looming Golden Arches, product placement in films and TV, etc. . . .). Nobody in pop music seems to have a better handle on this then Miho Hatori, the Tokyo-born frontwoman of the NYC duo Cibo Matto, a name that translates from Italian as "Food Crazy."

On Viva! La Woman (Warner Bros.), the group's highly acclaimed debut, Hatori sings, screams, squeals, and talks about everything from fallen apples and prickly artichokes to beef jerky and blue chicken, stopping along the way to taste spicy ice cream and spoiled birthday cake. She's like a mischievous kid left unattended at a buffet table and reveling in the opportunity to let her imagination roam freely as her innocent hands wander from plate to plate. Sometimes, when the sugar-buzz overwhelms her, she becomes a woman possessed, frantically building cryptic monoliths out of "extra sugar/extra salt/extra oil/and MSG" ("Birthday Cake"), like Richard Dreyfuss and his mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Hatori's partner in crime, and the woman who makes all this mischief possible, is Yuko Honda, another Japanese-born transplant to the land of two percent milk and Sue Bee honey (actually, Manhattan's Lower East Side). Honda's passion is for the startling array of sounds that envelop our supermarket society, which she rummages through with the reckless enthusiasm of a bargain hunter set loose at a clearance sale. She collects sonic snippets on her low-tech keyboard/beat box: a slice of Duke Ellington's "Caravan" solo, a nugget of soul from Paul Weller's "Hung Up," some Western spaghetti courtesy of Ennio Morricone, a dash of Cuban spice from Machito and his Afro Cuban Jazz Ensemble, a little saucy French sensuality from Francis Lai's "Vivre pour vivre." Then, with the maverick confidence of a cross-cultural fusion chef, she mixes these disparate flavors atop a spacious bed of raw hip-hop beats, garnishes them with found sounds from the streets of New York (people chattering, cars driving, moans of ecstasy from a nearby alley), and serves them up as exotic postmodern pastiches.

The binding ingredient in Cibo Matto is Hatori's schizophrenic voice, which -- despite its English-as-a-second-language limitations -- is capable of finding the right mood for each of Honda's soundscapes. It's soft and soothing on the velvety verses of "Sugar Water," which recall the jazzy pop shadings of Sade. It bursts with violence in the Beastie Boys-style discofied frenzy of "Birthday Cake." It's unnervingly innocent on the intro to "White Pepper Ice Cream," which is reminiscent of Portishead's dreamy soundscapes. And it's just plain evil in a sly kind of way on the duo's skeletal deconstruction of "The Candy Man."

Part of what's made Viva! La Woman such a fascinating find for Warner Bros. and the dozens of journalists and hipsters who've sung Cibo Matto's praises can be chalked up to novelty value. Still, Hatori isn't the first woman to sing about food, and there are dozens of precedents for Honda's cut-and-past sampling. (It may be the first time an Asian woman, or anyone for that matter, has sung from the perspective of a 300-pound man who likes fucking horses -- see "Beef Jerky" -- but that's a whole other story.) What sets Cibo Matto apart from other technocrats and puts them in a league with Portishead or Beck is the way they humanize technology without pigeonholing themselves. This isn't trip-hop, jungle, acid jazz, chill-out, or any of the other fleeting, elitist, nouveau-fixes that club culture has sustained itself on for the past few years. It's pop that trips along to an idiosyncratic beat, consumes some of the stuff that's consuming a little of each of us every day, and spits it back out in tasty little morsels that even a Russian shrink could get a kick out of.


Cibo Matto headline T.T. the Bear's Place next Friday, April 26.


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