Radio Album
A CD by Brown Whörnet
Austin Music Mafia, Austin
www.brownwhornet.com

download Track 1
download Track 5

If you haven't guessed it from the name, the first thing to learn about the Austinian band Brown Whörnet is that playfulness is as central to their music as flapping wings is to flying. The Radio CD delivers one pungent punch after another, crushing the silences between songs with snazzy snippets from their own bag of ethereal buffoonery and crushing the songs themselves with silences. I guess a simpler way to put it would be to say that Brown Whörnet always goes for the unexpected, and scores consistently, even when you've learned to expect it. Yes, even the umpteenth time around, you would still stumble across some musical or verbal event that you missed the previous times, and it will come as a surprise.
     Beneath the playfulness, Brown Whörnet are also excellent musicians with a staggering range of abilities. Anyone who can open with a hopping pseudo-Latino polka and drift effortlessly into Speed Metal knows more about the way music moves than your average classical violinist, and what is more, is not afraid to venture into the darker recesses of his creative imagination. And if they are willing to go there, I am willing to follow. Because it's fun.
     The nearest I can come to phrasing the common theme of this album would be "a variety of punch-lines," a truly syncretic exploration of wit shuttling between the realms of language and music. It's wonderfully layered and diverse, you can listen to it in the back of your mind as well as in the front. The only thing that this album chooses not to deliver is the impression of structure. Instead, the listener is immersed into a hectic bricolage of sound that gains its form (if any) from defying form. In my mind, the sound-shape becomes a fluctuating, elusive inkblot; hmm, could this be a Brown Whörnet I'm seeing?