Mercoledì 4 Gen 2006, 13:49

LINE-UP:
BJORK - Vocals
GUD KRIST - Electric Strings
BIRGIR - Bass
MELAX - DX7, Piano
SIGTRYGGUR - Drums
EINAR ORN - Vocals, Trumpet

KUKL is one of my favourite band. It's an old band, their two albums ("The Eye" and "Holidays in Europe (The Naughty Nought)" came out in 1984 (in fact when I was born!). It was the first and original band line-up of The Sugarcubes, featuring the international superstar Bjork Gudmundsdottir. However, there are no real links between KUKL's music and The Sugarcubes (except maybe if you consider "Dragon" by The Sugarcubes, which is one of their earliest recordings).

KUKL means in Icelandic "Sorcerer", and their music relates perfectly to this name: strange music, effective and atmospheric, very weird, very dark and obscure; but also dark artwork (above all for "The Eye"), and dark philosophy.

Bjork now says the members of KUKL (and so also she…) were stupid terrorists, and now they all have grown since then, but I personally think KUKL's music is not so far from musical perfection…

The lyrics are all in English, except the beginning of one song of their second album. It deals with rape, with birth (those two songs I'm talking about are on the second album and there are no titles), with murder ("Anna"), with "self-touching" ("Dismembered"), with death ("Assassin"), and those kind of darker, taboo subjects not usually dealt with by most rock bands.

What kind of music do KUKL make? Quite difficult to say… in the little booklet inside "Holidays in Europe (the Naughty Nought)" , it is written "Hard Rock from some Tasty Geysers"…I would say it's the kind of music which makes me realise plenty of things about my life, about life…the kind of music which makes me want to go and meet Mandi Vampire in her Crypt…the kind of music which makes me feel quite different from the person I am when I go drinking in a pub, when I go to school, when I eat, when I'm joking with some friends…the kind of music which makes me want to dance naked near a lake in a great forest during a night when the Goddess Moon is full…

If any visitors to this journal know of KUKL and their art (and if you appreciate their music or not) please contact me at stelanova@yahoo.com - I would love to know how other people are affected by their music, what it means to their lives, how it could best be described…. Any thoughts, opinions or just a desire to chat about KUKL, then please don't hesitate to contact me!