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USKÉ ORCHESTRA
Niko Et La Berlue / Sonig / Rough Trade

Allow us to split hairs over a subtle difference: Uské Orchestra’s music is indeed a mixture of styles,
but not in the sense of avant-garde. For here no pop music styles are referenced, wildly combined and
rendered ridiculous as a result. No, this project around Niko Uské rather assembles and stacks
microscopic bits from all possible genres and styles to build teeming musical market places. Uské
Orchestra prefer to work with their own recorded acoustic sounds. Within seconds they change the
mood, the instrument, the timbre and the arrangement. If there ever was an award for devious sound
design, Uské Orchestra would be the clear winner. Just imagine the sound track to ‘the Matrix’,
performed by a hyperactive brass band from the Balkans or Mexico. Close-up nothing about this music
is ostentatious; but if you take a step back and view the sound paintings on Niko Et La Berlue as a
whole, you’ll notice the impermeability and voluminous magnitude of the tracks. Just as the mighty
Leviathan emerges out of a mass of little people, ant heaps crop up here out of innumerable triads.

If there is a connection between music and language, then a babbling mess is prevalent with Uské
Orchestra. Sometimes it sounds to us as if ballads, bluegrass, polka, lounge jazz or electronics are
played, but then again we are not quite sure. This is music that smirkingly teases and entangles us in
its rough poetry.

A lot on Niko Et La Berlue sounds like a load of jam sessions with only a rough direction, recorded on
top of each other and then finished off with a good shake. What ne0-folk frequently promised, but then
disappointingly delivered as regurgitated hippie music, is a real and new radical strategy in Uské
Orchestra’s case. The ensemble supports the music, the tones are free and the voice does not sit
dominatingly on top of the whole, but fits into the overall picture, dressed up as various personalities.
Uské Orchestra makes a strange kind of singer-songwriter music with simultaneous cut-up madness
and affected eccentric minstrelsy. Uské Orchestra is also a mystery, a kind of non-music we haven’t
had since Nurse with Wound. The wonderful artwork of the album and the lovingly meticulously
decorated live acts of the band complete the „Gesamtkunstwerk“, a successful synthesis of arts.

The album isn’t about themes or variations, even though there are key themes running through it.
However, Uske Orchestra does all but treat those key themes as such. His aim is to keep the music
free to flow liberally in all directions. For us as the listener it just means that we can’t do anything else
but listen and give in to this intensely maniacal cosmic myriad of sounds.

http://www.uskeorchestra.be/
http://www.sonig.com