Soliloquy 1 : Jooklo & Troglosound

Neokarma Jooklo Experience in Villanova dello Judrio (Virginia Genta, Maurizio Abate, Christian Zandonella, Andrea Gulli, Luca Massolin, David Vanzan)

Since Sun Ra started to leave Earth in the 70s in a pharaonic egotrip towards greater territories, it seems like there is a crucial « cosmic-occult » vector to explore the heavy catalog of outsider-musics. Something has emerged, perhaps as a sub-sub-musical-genre, as an aesthetic and communitarian alternative, lying in metaphysics dreams, vortexes and parallel dimensions.

Some hippie enthusiasts gathering around perception tools as reliable as the love of stars or multi-dimensional travels? The search of meta-terrestrial musics? Why not? Sounds alright, actually.
However, the lazy assemblage of multicolored triangles decorating the 1512th new-age-generic-drone cassette of 2012 might make you feel perplex about the sincerity of such a practice — i.e. the sickening amount of undeserved references to cosmos, psychotropic drugs, pagan ceremonies and so on… Sadly, today these pervading keywords are associated with a vague network of synthetic, kinda-cute-and-nicely-prepared-for-facebook-communication bedroom-projects, which for the most part are frankly dispensable.

Above this black viscid mass of new musics fancying themselves as “psychedelic”, there are a few resistant groups obsessed with producing — through ancient techniques you could have thought extinct in the fast-production-consumption era — rough, unpolished, both corporeal and spiritual musical forms .
There is for example an unfamiliar island close to the Italian coast where an audacious group of individuals are united under the mysterious banner “Jooklo”.

The Jooklo, a system in orbit around Virginia Genta’s and David Vazan’s hyper-duo, develops in various ramifications corresponding to many circumstantial groups/layouts : “Golden Jooklo Age“, “Neokarma Jooklo Experience/Trio/Sextet“, “New Jooklo Age”… many names that could fit perfectly your future local Order of the Solar Temple lodge. These numerous micro-structures prove the difficulty of drawing limits to the Jooklo sound ; the identity of the participants, the instruments, the sonic techniques, geographics, all these elements are hard to determine. What remains is the explicit message that a sincere affective community is struggling with a blurry mathematics to build a peculiar, psychedelic and physical entity they name Troglosound.
Troglosoud is the platform from where they broadcast their rugged forms of musics we could in a way call “ritualistic”. But not ritualistic as a bad joke, not as a senseless and out-of-context imitation, but as the genuine practice of people who fly high. Unlike 2010s’ plastic psychedelism, this is something rooted in immaterial traditions, this is something funnily hippie from a time which predates the digital revolution.

The Jooklos, like some nonchalant and highly sympathetic Luddites, are certainly having a lot of fun playing around with all these cultural anachronisms. You can most likely meet them in the course of one of their numerous tours, while traveling with an extensive band of desperados, or in a smaller format. I assume that they spend the rest of their time looking after their label (an activity they prove to excel in) and other stuff I would not even assume.
Virginia and David play a lot as a duo these days. It sounds like some primitive and very explosive free-jazz. Sometimes Bill Nace, the super-guitar-noise-hero, joins them in an improv fury.

Bologna with Bill Nace

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To understand what their new obsession is about :

Jooklo Duo – Time Over (right click + save as) – Unreleased take, rec January 2010, Tenor Sax Virginia Genta, Drums David Vanzan