It may be tempting to call Nonagonic Now world music for indie rockers, but it's much weirder than that description might imply. This isn't a band bringing its indigenous musical tradition to a wider audience, it's a bunch of freaks from New Zealand putting several different styles into a blender, pouring the resulting mix into a nine-sided mold, and then dancing gleefully on the mold until it shatters. Over the course of the album, Orchestra of Spheres move through a myriad of sounds, including Balinese gamelan, African folk flavors, wah-wah-laden psychedelic freakouts, off-kilter art funk, dance music, and general electro-acoustic oddness. If all of this genre-hopping were done in a more arid, academic manner, it would probably be about as much fun as watching paint dry. But Orchestra of Spheres are the furthest thing from a bunch of intellectual experimenters. From the sound of it, they're a wild-eyed band of musical gypsies, hell-bent on using whatever tools they might have on hand to build a big, blowout dance party where losing yourself in an ecstatic frenzy is the ultimate goal. Toward that end, they employ a number of intriguing-sounding homemade instruments -- where else are you likely to encounter a "sexomouse marimba," for example, or a "biscuit tin guitar?" Nonagonic Now is full of joyful sounds that might not always be easy to identify, but make it consistently impossible to remain seated. ~ J. Allen
