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| LOOP GURU : News | Bio | Reviews | Gigs | Music | Video | Photo | Email | |||
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 Loop Guru "Bathtime with Loop Guru" Neither world music, ambient or experimental - though they have been justly described as all three, and more - Loop Guru have often trod a parallel path to Transglobal Underground, mashing Casbah atmosphere with the relentless advance of technology. Here though they add a dash of Northern Soul to the mix; not the kind youíll find at the Wigan Casino, instead they summon images of collieries, brass bands and pigeons, transplanted to a bazaar in Marrakech. If anything theyíve moved closer to Lemon Jelly, creating a translucent lysergic landscape through which float the ghosts of George Harrison, Sheila Chandra and Peter Kay. Echoes of every beautiful experience youíve ever had abound, and while Loop Guru were ones to watch way back in 1992, today they are a band in front of whom we should prostrate ourselves. Music this magical is rare indeed. Fela Lewis - LOGO Magazine March 2003 |
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 New waves : Tomorrow's Sounds Today PLYING A GLOBAL PILLAGE Ten Years ago, there were few of the digital rhythm looping and sound sampling devices that musicians now operate with more ease than their cigarette lighters. Unless you were a bloated moneybags in the millionaire class, making a repeatin drum loop required miles of magnetic tape, cotton reels, knitting needles, garden shears and a substantial supplpy of sticky-backed plastic. Loop Guru have a history which stretches back to this Heath Robinson era, which explains half of the name. Suggestions of lycanthropy and spiritual leadership are also embedded into their clever little gem, we are forewarned of a band with a tendency to laminate meanings into a dense,semiotic, er...plywood. And that is exactly the musical method of their first album. Duniya, released on Nation Records, is a fluid collage of global sounds. Digital plywood this may be, but Loop Guru transcend the stigma of synthetic fakes by bringing a rare refinement to their matching of sound sources. With its shuffling, drum beat and floating Arabic and Indian melodies, Dunya could be compared, in the loosest possible way, to the number one hits of Enigma. But Enigma have reduced the potentials of sampling to a narrow band of background Muzak designed to mask awkward silences at a dinner party. "Perfection is completely boring" says Loop Guru's Sam, usually known under the alias of Salman Gita. "For me, our music is organic." The list of influences they include on the sleeve of their album is formidable. Sir Michael Tippett rubs shoulder with Jacques Tati, Ken Livingstone MP and Pink Floyd's former frontman, Syd Barrett. As this suggest, the final outcome owes as much to attitude as anything else. At the end of a richly packed CD, the final track runs for 21 minutes and 45 seconds. Ken Livingstone would approve, surely. David Toop - The Times - 1994 |
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 LOOP GURU Dunya IMAGINE YOU'RE being dragged, buffeted, shoved and squeezed through the sweatiest, noisiest bazaar in the world. It could be Marrakech, Bombay or Brick Lane... anywhere that life is so intense it, becomes a blur. Screams and chants and nustle and rattle reverberate all around, but those sounds are some way in the distance because, swarfing everything, there's a huge percussive thunder playing in your headphones. Sometimes breakbeats, sometimes stomach-caving dub, always insistent and unvoidable. And somehow, through the clutter and madness, it all seems graceful - enchanting, even. That, roughtly, is where Loop Guru's 'Dunya' takes you; to the ambient-tinged, tranced -out, headly-accented heart of global techno. Label and soulmates of the mighty Trans-Global Underground, Loop Guru take a more nagging and insistent trip through myriad musical. cultures, so that this, their debut album 4the title, suitably, means 'the world' in Urdu) acts as one long, long panoramic groove. Which means that pulling specific tracks out of this dense, haunting, looping marvel is almost as aimless as trying to analyse onebar of some cossily formulatic rock song. Still, 'Hymn' makes an ecstatic opening, all shimmering samples, exotically frugging beats and intoxicating wailing from Susssan Deihim, a kind of tranian Liz Fraser. 'Aphrodite's Shoe' and 'Senseless' shift into sleek and pulsing deep dub littered with tinkling, whistling, see-sawing noises from a load of undentiflable instruments. And 'Bangdad' brings everything right into focus, smack in the middle of that, clanging, confusing, sensory-overloading street market. Your pead whrls, 'Duniya' floats on and on with a beautiful., celebratory sense of purpose, and the world seems to shrinks a little bit more. On wards! (8) Jhon Mulvey - NME 1994 |
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 The Guardian - 1999 Meanwhile, as their former chanteuse, the marvelllous Natacha Atlas, establishes herself as the Middle Eastern Shirley Bassy, pionners of eastern flavoured techno Transglobal Underground have reincarnated themselves as Temple Of Sound. Their album Black Orchid Album (Schtumm ***) has a harder edge than previously, and they can still conjure the whirlwind when the faney takes them. Transglobal's old Nation labelmates Loop Guru, who were also several notches above the usual global - hippy ambient tosh, habe put out a delicious CD called "The Fountains of Paradise (North South ***). Full of found voices and odd atmosphere, this os far too oblique and intriguing to mediate to, unless you really have to. But you'll only ruon it. David Bennun - The Guardian - 1999 |
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 Albums of the Year Loop Guru - Dunya Light a blue joss-stick and retire but this was more than mere pleasant ambient with token exotic fragrances. Loop Guru draw on an incredibile musicological wealth, wich they melded beautifully with dubwise and dance sensibilities. Every musical sound under the sun thrown in , yet they flowed as pure as water. Melody Maker - 1994 |
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 EVENING
STANDARD - 1999Loop Guru - The Fountains of Paradise Loop Guru call this album an example of "New World sampledelia" which makes it sound like a cookery course involving lemon grass and baby shrimp. According to their website, they also employ "state-of-the-art bliss enchnacers" when recording their music, tough fail to say where one can get one's hands on such a desirable contraption. They are , of course, mad as fish. Still, the noise they make - think Gregorian nuns with a passion for David Dylvian and bass guitar - is pleasingly soporific and unique. You'll like this if you're an eco-warrior/Tibetian monk/toying with the idea of going to Kathmandu for your holydays. |
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 LOOP GURU - LIVE @ ASTORIA, LONDON - 1997 At first sight, we're on totally different planets; them with their tie-dyed trousers, plaited beards and rainbow-banded jumpers, giving away the scent of spliff, all part of a global semi-consciousness. And then there's me, who values the perspective of the individual over that of the collective, the conceit of artifice over the conceit of "nature", who only ever felt western culture compared unfavourably for half an hour after watching "The Emerald Forest". I shouldn't belong here but I do. When Loop Guru take the stage, we are all of us as one. I love Loop Guru. They're one of the bands I hold close, as though they were part of a personal armoury. It's not so much for the nobility of their sources as for the way they liberate them, offer them absolute freedom in the here and now. Loop Guru do for the history of the world what Saint Etienne do for the history of pop; they distill it down to its common denominator of joy, use their extensive terms of reference as invocations for the sublime. It's the mark of a perfect pop band that they make it look so easy, but only because their instincts are so finely honed. Loop Guru are idealists, but that in itself wouldn't mean much to me if it didn't arise from anything other than their unyielding precision. There's an innocence about them that only their breadth of knowledge could define, and a selflessness that only the most self-aware could allow. Ethno-dance might often be an excuse for lazy sampling and cynicism, but LG have an integrity you can surf on, one one you can't help but feel accomodated by, a coherence that never lets you down. The latest "Loop Bites Dog" LP might, for the most part, be a more chilled out, lingering affair, but tonight they're a non-stop exotic cabaret, an emphatic da-glo carnival. Inda Goldfinger is an ecstatic dynamo, dancing across the stage with the kind of beatific beam you get across your face when you find your equilibrium at a point close to exhaustion, and ocassionally letting out a wail of such yearning clarity it sets you reeling, only for the rhythms to pick you up again, to lose you once more in their giddy velocity. They take in (what sounds like) Aboriginal ragga chants, South American rallying cries, Eastern drones -- who knows what. All I do know is that their samples aren't badges, but rocket fuel, that Loop Guru embrace even me because they reach for something higher than the sum of their parts. Wondering where it's all coming from seems like an afterthought when you're dancing like a bastard. Johnathan Selzer -Melody Maker - 1997 |
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