Snöleoparden - "Snöleoparden"

Snöleoparden - Lille Cykel (Rump 2008)

Snöleoparden - Snöleoparden / Rump

For the longest time I was trying to figure out why Mofus and Badun member Jonas Stampe's latest musical excursion under the Snöleoparden alias sounded so familiar. It was not that I had heard Snöleoparden before; quite the contrary, in fact. The Danish resident, complete with a politically charged Pakistani background, had made his way onto my radar via Sonic Frontiers, who have recently been making their way onto my radar for more off-the-radar things recently. It was the sounds, the playful nature of this release, reminded me of something I had heard before. I could not put my finger on it.

So I listened and read and discovered. Rump is inclined to provide glitchy releases from people like Karsten Plfum and Icarus, but Snöleoparden is more of an organic experience that you discover right away when the first sounds of his self-titled debut are that of a xylophone. Gradually, "Nr. 1." turns into a happy accident that would fit right in with Black Dice's brighter moments in its wordless warping of the initial melody. It's hard to escape the xylophones. They are the dominant instrument on this album.

"Hodja Fra Pjort" features children singing along to a strummed guitar and, once again, the xylophones. As a rendition of a kid's pop song, Stampe injects a starry-eyed innocence that puts the listener at ease. This whole record is innocence. I don't know why I'm saying the same things over and over, except to say that I have been reduced to a child merely by listening to the Pakistani folk song "Dreng." I feel like I'm 11 years old listening to Afrobeat or something. It's hard to believe it took a Dane to bring me there. Then she told me.

"This sounds like a Wes Anderson soundtrack."

Of course it does. This perspective - that every sound has the capability to make us wonder and awe and think about what we're hearing - has been the common thread in each of Anderson's movies. It's been a recurring criticism that he has never been able to escape that perspective, and perhaps that's where Rumpe finds himself here. But this is only his first album. This isn't a rut he's dug himself into. This is not yet his voice, because we don't know what his voice is. What we do know is that childhood is less removed from his memory than it may be ours, because Rumpe remembers. He remembers the sights, the sounds, the feelings, the mentality.

To this end, there are the obvious mini-triumphs in the smiling xylophones of the first three tracks. But there is also "Grieg," which appears on the CD version as the finale but not the LP version for some reason. This has been identified by some reviewers as the saving grace of an album that they largely feel they "get" but do not really relate to. "Grieg" represents something close to what they're familiar with: adult anxieties. But I see "Grieg" as an extension of the childhood that Rumpe lives for the first eight songs. Switching from reel-to-reel recorders to live sets to homemade excerpts preserves a youthful inability to want to know everything all the time. It can't focus because we couldn't, either.

Ultimately, Snöleoparden is a meditation (or maybe just a rumination) on what it means to be a kid discovering new noise. At times slow to evolve and at others too quick to keep up with, the album is as artfully skilled in jumping from style to style as the snow leopard is in jumping from cliff to cliff. I don't know what else to say. My kindergarten self has emerged and is taking over my brain. This is the new beat. That's all I can say in big, goofy letters on paper with the trace down the middle so you can loop your lowercase Bs to meet the line, dot your I above it, red ink at the base, blue to stop the stick, what is going on here, there are only six fonts available? Macintosh? One-button mouse. Square screens. A new decade. Welcome.