Woo – Awaawaa

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The brother duo of Woo describes an alternate history of rock music, had it winced at the bright lights of the stage, eschewed the spotlight’s elevation of the masculine and all it’s attendant human excess, and bedded down with instrumentation at the microbial level. Across a long career beginning in the early 70s, Mark and Clive Ives crafted untold numbers of songs that occupy a genre all their own; even now, decades on, there is little to compare it to. There are of course some parallels to Woo in the splintering of UK underground music after punk: Young Marble Giants also made big music on a tiny scale, Vini Reilly’s Durutti Column project was full of half-dreamed sketches, Shriekback and Wire confected similar dubwise reductions, but none of these groups quite approach the cloistered innocence that shows in the music of Woo. This collection of unreleased material culled from their vast archive for release on the Palto Flats label (who brought us last year’s sublime Mariah reissue) is as good an introduction as any to the band’s sound: each track brims with gently, hypnotically strummed guitars, chiming casio, brushed slackened snare, lonely clarinet, and the loosest rhythm tracks available commercially. More crucial to the duo’s songs than any of these elements, however, are the conditions in which they were made. The brothers worked on this music for years without any ambitions that it would be heard by anyone else. Their first commercial release came in 1982, ten years after they had begun playing together. The themes present in this music have risen to the top over years of performance, like jewels in a bog, and gleam with a polish that’s quite hard-won.