Cibo Matto

Viva La Woman (Warner, 1996) is a flamboyant act of interdisciplinary rock (once again entirely devoted to food), mixing stereotypes from every genre in a creative and ironic fashion. The only constant is the polished hip-hop groove, drifting toward trip-hop, that spreads amoeba-like across all the tracks. Everything else is unpredictable. In Apple, the sensual and anemic vocals, the esoteric ceremonial cadence, and the hard-rock riffs could hardly be more mismatched. The rap of Beef Jerky is a nursery rhyme floating over a dreamlike electronic background. The inventions multiply. Know Your Chicken strings together a children's chorus and a complicated interplay of dissonances, comic interludes, and breaks. Theme (ten minutes) pulls a little of everything out of the trunk: exotic polyrhythms and clownish wind-instrument noises, distorted music boxes, and "found" sounds. Artichoke, a compromise between John Cage's aleatoric music and new-age meditation music, unfolds with a deliberately serious tone as it tells a comic story that drifts along amid hesitant piano chords and flutes. The triumph is Sugar Water, complete with ghostly vocal flourishes, underwater organ, and a "la la" refrain reminiscent of 1960s film soundtracks. The songs are not structures, narratives, or logical constructions, but merely juxtapositions of sonic gestures.

Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda ganged up with Russell Simins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to record Butter 08 (Grand Royal, 1996). While a few ideas are intriguing (Mono Lisa is an early, psychedelic Pink Floyd-ian crescendo, Dick Serious is a hot, latin-jazz instrumental, How Do I Relax is classical supermarket muzak), the album is too confused to stand on its own merits.

Little is whimsical on Stereo Type A (Warner Bros, 1999). Cibo Matto, that is now augmented with Sean Lennon, is no more a novelty than Julio Iglesias. Unfortunately, the sound is also not much more adventurous and the best song, Moonchild, sounds exactly like one of those elegant Inglesias melodies. Honda is still a master of the eccentric arrangement, and Hatori is one of the most original rappers in the world, but this time they run the gamut of musical genres without enough personality to excel in any: heavy metal (Blue Train), raga (Working For Vacation), pop (Flowers), soul (King Of Silence). Except for one song (the funny rap of Sci-Fi Wasabi), very little of this is ironic. Mostly, it's what bands do to become pop stars when they have run out of inspiration.

Yuka Honda's first solo album, Memories Are My Only Witness (Tzadik, 2002), is a display of her eclecticism but the collage of styles is sometimes self-indulgent. It was followed by Eucademix (Tzadik, 2004), a more demented effort.

Miho Hatori played bossa nova with Brazilian musician Smokey Hormel on the EP Tempo De Amor (Afro Sambas, 2002) and debuted solo with Ecolypsis (2006) in the vein of Kate Bush and Bjork.