Beatbox Bauchklang at Blue Frog

I have a schedule. And it rarely has visiting a honey clad place like Blue Frog on a Friday scribbled down somewhere on it. Leaving the details to roost, a bunch of pending reports and the fact that my girl was out of town with friends who are way too sloshed on weekends to tell Pavarotti apart from our dear Mr Mathers, I waltzed into Blue Frog hoping for an evening of jollies.

And did I have one. But this one isn’t about Blue Frog and its womb like warmth, its about Bauchklang.

Bauchklang is an Austrian beatbox group which bills itself as the ‘ vocal groove project’. Me being a nitpicking purist, would never call anything groove unless Miles Davis had blessed it. Bauchklang would belong to more of a avantgard hip-hop, ragaa and tribal genre. But hey, its no ways as catchy as ‘vocal groove project’.

This group is probably what all music loving folk like you and me, ( me at least ) would evolve into. Using our voicebox as a beatbox. The whole band is ‘instrument less’. Its five members, Andreas Fraenzl (Lead vocals), Gerald Huber (Human Beatbox), Christian Birawsky (Mouthpercussion), Alex Boeck (Bass) and Philipp Sageder (Vocal Sounds). Now human beat boxes and mouth percussionists I have heard of, but the bassist was the one that stole the show.

I have rarely approved of anything that hips and hops, probably due to a traumatic experience as a child, involving a grasshopper. But, these guys managed a balance between their hip hop tracks and their soul drumming. Rising tides of beats, flatten down to a solo, then are joined in by a chorus of the instruments, except that there aren’t any. I must attribute their amazing work to sorcery, for I simply fail to comprehend how such intricate pieces are conjured. Performances, where the band is at one with their instruments are the most successful, but in his case, the Austrians must surely be masters of Zen. The energy that runs through hem is unlike what I have seen, pardon my management degree, but its dirty pure synergy.

I am sure I’ll be taking my girl to the anywhere these guys are performing next. Now only if Blue Frog sold the performing band’s CD’s, I would probably have got a couple.