Yayoba's 'Matkat' Is Fourteen Short Trips to Places That Don't Exist
The Sonic Breakdown
Yayoba are three people from three corners of Europe: Paul Wilson, an electroacoustic composer and yoga teacher from Brighton; Johannes Schebler, the prolific German behind Hui and Baldruin; and Jani Hirvonen from Tampere, Finland, who partners with Schebler in the duo Grykë Pyje. Matkat is their second record, out on Not Not Fun as NNF447 — digital plus a now sold-out cassette — and its title is simply the Finnish word for “journeys” or “trips.”
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Fourteen tracks across roughly 37 minutes means almost nothing gets longer than three and a half (“Transparent Waves” is the outlier at 4:10). That brevity forces the low end to work fast: throbbing waveforms establish ground in seconds so the detail above can start moving. Bandcamp Daily’s Louis Pattison described the palette as “organic-sounding yet crisply digital, future-coded yet at times suggesting an ancient ritual.”
The Spatial Dynamics: This is the record’s real achievement. Per Pattison: “Willowy pipes and clanking gamelan percussion mingle with throbbing waveforms or pointillistic digital melodies, while a keen eye for the spatial organization of sound means that tracks pop with detail, opening up to reveal squiggling intricacies or hidden dimensions.” Nothing is buried. Everything has an address.
Standout Performance
Jared Carrigan’s mastering. On a record this dense with small gestures — the chittering textures and gong rings of “Molecular Fizz,” the temple-music hallucination of “Luminous Figure” — a heavy hand would have flattened the whole point. Carrigan left the air in.
Why It’s Certified
“Outsider Heart” is the one that’ll hook the dancers; Pattison compared it to “the sort of mutant dance music made by late-period Black Dice,” which is exactly right for its 3:12. The trio’s own description promises “lunar mycological seances” and “spore-harvesting reveries,” and for once the press copy undersells it. Pattison’s closing call: Matkat is “a strange and beguiling trip in its own right.” Fourteen of them, actually, and not one overstays.