KESHAVARA

Keshavara wear magnificent moustaches, bold headgear and speak an adventurous patois of English, Hindi, German and Gibberish. On their new album "III", the Cologne-based band led by German-Indian musician Keshav Purushotham create sounds the way other people mix drinks after they've already enjoyed three: Washed-out kraut-pop and diasporic dub-not-dub excursions are combined by eye and shaken wildly. Sugar-sweet meandering melodies, borrowed from a fantastic no man's land in the border region between exotic library compositions and psychedelic soundtracks, merge with the grooves of a rhythm section that would have felt right at home in the recording studios of funky Beirut in the mid-seventies. The result is cocktails topped with a surrealistic sugar rim with the effect of hallucinogenic Jell-O. Music that shimmers and flickers like a mirage in the desert. One moment Keshavara sound as if Ennio Morricone had set a Bollywood film to music, and the next like an Eden Ahbez song produced by Curt Boettcher, or - not quite as spinous but no less fantastic - as if Khruangbin and Sven Wunder had finally recorded an album together. In the most brilliant moments, it all comes together as if by magic, culminating in songs like "Spiegelmann" and "Tableau Vivant" - phantasmagoric parties full of transcultural clashes that invite us listeners to transform them into colorful group choreographies.