GABOR CSUPO
Kalmopyrin (Tone Casualties Records)
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes

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Kalmopyrin is the name of a headache remedy available in Gabor Csupo's native Hungary. Likewise his album of electronic music is a great little headache remedy, better in fact: it's the best new electronic music I've heard all year.

Gabor Csupo is the same guy who has gained fame working on several Nickelodeon animated successes, Rugrats and The Wild Thornberrys (Klasky-Csupo Productions) to name a couple. This is my first exposure to his musical endeavors, but he's actually released several CDs over the last nine years. I'm definitely going to check them out after hearing this one.

Unlike a lot of modern electronic music albums that are all mixed together to keep the dance floor hopping, Kalmopyrin is composed of 13 discrete tracks. There's no attempt to segue the themes together, but the album is always engaging and there isn't a bad track here. Each is its own world, running from a classic electronic sound spiced with the occasional guitar and singing to more modern jungle beats with vocal samples on top.

Refreshingly unlike the mainstream electronic-techno artists who think any vocal or rhythm sample repeated once is worth repeating a thousand times, Csupo (pronounced "Soop-o") has formulated Kalmopyrin with lots of interesting melodies and clever hooks. When he does make tracks with spoken word samples, he usually employs several of them in each track, providing a bit of counterpoint instead of running a single one into the ground. A good example of that is the first track, "Mary Goes Around," a delightful amalgam of classic electronic sound that harks back to the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre with a more acidic jungle beat. There are a few tracks that feature real singing too. My favorites so far include "Sharazade," a lovely moody piece that wormed its way into my brain after only a couple listenings, mostly because of a low guitar motif that sounds rather like something an alto sax would do. Heck, maybe it is an alto sax after all. This track is starting to remind me of Wrong Way Up, the Brian Eno-John Cale album of several years ago. The whole approach to the music is to bring in other instruments as an electronic ensemble rather that to confine the music to keyboard sounds. The last track is a 14 minute piece mysteriously titled "Three Fish And The Seven Dwarfs" that I love to put on replay and listen to for an hour or so.

Kalmopyrin is definitely going to make my Best Five CDs Of The Year list, this is great stuff.

© 2002 - Rusty Pipes