IUMA HAS IT

Blogging The Internet Underground Music Archive

Andromeda

First, apologies for the absolutely ludicrous delay; I’ve been alternately swamped and in rural Pennsylvania (sometimes, swamped in rural Pennsylvania) for the past few weeks.

Now, without further self-deprecation, here’s Andromeda, whose site boasts the most eerily accurate X-meets-Y-meets-Z description I’ve ever read. (Madonna, Pink Floyd and Red Hot Chili Peppers are all involved.)

Trawling through dozens of bands’ self-written bios means slogging through so much amateur, unenticing copy. You can’t blame them — the intersection of up-and-coming bands and bands who know or can afford seasoned copywriters isn’t as big as you’d think — but it does mean that the good ones don’t grab you so much as  shove you to attention. So it is with Andromeda:

Andromeda was formed at the behest of its maniacal robotic drummer, Andromeda Crush, who was self- assembled from genuine toyota parts on a rainy day in a Chula Vista junkyard.

I know, right? Perhaps you find this twee or contrived; I find it fantastic. Andromeda Crush sounds like a long-lost member of Jem and the Holograms who got her own twelve-episode spinoff. I would listen to her music on name alone.

Biographical copy means never having to listen to music on name alone. Google doesn’t have much on Andromeda, but it has enough: an old-HTML relic boasting a lot of photos that don’t exist online anymore, a few mp3 samples that also don’t exist anymore, mentions of two CDs that might exist in a box in California somewhere, some talk of “soul sourcing” and “destiny cards” that’s exactly as useful as you think it sounds, and — the part that makes this enough — a link to IUMA and their SoundClick page. On there, we find a description:

Pink Floyd meets Madonna at a Chilli Peppers Show.
This is stunningly accurate, as you can assess for yourself by listening to “Suspicion” on that site. The instrumental frippery really does sound like Pink Floyd, the vocals really are processed like Madonna’s, and there’s some RHCP to the bassline. It’s great stuff.

But IUMA’s track is “MicroMythology,” which either acquired or lost the “Micro” in the transition to or from SoundClick. It’s equally striking, piano and synth lines slicing and reeling through production fog and the vocalist (whose name I, sadly, have yet to track down; their IUMA bio mentions no band members by name, and their official page mentions no vocalists) soars over it all like Madge would had her career — late-’80s perhaps, from the sound of this — taken her to this sector of space. The song’s called Mythology and the band’s called Andromeda, which cant be coincidental; sure enough, it’s from the Greek figure’s perspective, and it unties her from the subtext non-scholars probably forgot was there, with lines like “I don’t need your heroes, I’ll save myself” and “I can’t depend on Medusa’s head / don’t need your feathered heels or Zeus’s bed / time to change the author.” Whether this was meant as a one-off or as part of a larger concept album, I’ll almost always take a second or third listen to this sort of re-appropriation. Particularly when it’s this listenable. 

Oh, And One More Thing: From their “Write to us, and we might put you in a song!” Like most statements found on the Internet years later, this request is like something in a bottle, washed up on the shore who knows how long after the fact. This probably won’t happen. But if anyone’s reading this, and if the crew’s still together, well, if it’s OK with Saint Etienne….

  1. katherinestasaph reblogged this from iumahasit and added:
    Why, yes, I’m still doing this! Today we’ve got spacey re-imaginings of Greek mythology that might as well be sung by...
  2. iumahasit posted this