5:32am Sugar Water by Cibo Matto from Viva! La Woman
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#cibomatto
Now Playing: Cibo Matto – Super Relax
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Cibo Matto:
🎵 Moonchild
https://noisem4chine.bandcamp.com/track/cibo-matto-moonchild-rap-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/4XalmoFLB7dtAEVomgCL0X
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Selected influences (part 7)
#LaLuz #MassiveAttack #NeilYoung #RayLaMontagne #ShintaroSakamoto #Splashh #TheDoors #WhiteDenim #WildNothing #SquirrelNutZippers #CiboMatto #JescaHoop #ParquetCourts #UNKLE #UnknownMortalOrchestra #DianeCoffee #EdwardSharpeAndTheMagneticZeros #EdwardSharpe #LemonDemon #NedsAtomicDustbin #Plaid #SoftHair #TheSmile #AneBrun #BeachHouse #MyDryWetMess #TheBlackAngels #YasmeenAminaOlya #TheShins #Younghusband #Amiina #BrianEno #DanielRossen #MichaelKiwanuka #TheSpires
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Cibo Matto:
🎵 King of Silence (Dan the Automator remix)
Listen to this track by New York-based trip-hop kitsch pop duo Cibo Matto. It’s “Sugar Water” a cut from their 1996 debut record, Viva! La Woman. Among other things, the band were known as the pop group who wrote songs about food, their name being an Italian phrase roughly translated crazy food or food madness. The subject of food on the record is consciously in place to make their material easily relatable. After all, meals and eating are as big a part of the human experience as any heavy emotion or event in one’s life. In that respect, their material was written with the conventional goal to establish common ground with an audience; an old-fashioned punk rock gambit if there ever was one.
Besides that, Cibo Matto are pretty hard to pin down genre-wise. Founding members Yuka Honda (keyboards, sequencers) and Miho Hatori (vocals) both emerged from noise rock and experimental scenes in New York. Their music is a strain of deconstructed and reconstituted hip hop and pop music with a punk-funk edge filtered through disparate and far flung ingredients like bossa nova, Sixties lounge jazz, and vintage soundtracks. On “Sugar Water”, they sample Ennio Morricone’s “Sospesi Nel Cielo” from the film score for the 1964 Italian subculture documentary I Malamondo.
Despite their wide musical interests, it was hard for a lot of people to get past the quirkiness of the whole food thing. In some ways, Cibo Matto leaned into their bubbly, quirky image and their reputation for writing upbeat punkish songs about chicken, beef jerky, and birthday cakes. It was easy to miss the deeper territories found in their songs that point in directions hinting that food was always a metaphor for bigger themes that aren’t so bubbly and quirky.
On “Sugar Water”, the lyrical imagery is dreamlike, surreal, wrapped in aural muslin and away from the brashness of some of their other early songs. That doesn’t mean that it’s lightweight or that it doesn’t contain some powerful ideas. In fact beneath the veneer, there are some big themes that make this song a part of a tradition that New York-based bands have explored for decades in one manner or another; urban isolation and how to best survive it.
The Michael Gondry-directed music video for the song helps to bring this to the surface, notable at the time for its use of split-screen and time-shifting narratives of two women living in the city. In it, their lives cross only briefly in an environment characterized by cramped spaces, busy streets, unpredictable conditions, and potentially dangerous events. This is a New York song, a characteristic that’s only enhanced by its disorienting and yet visually compelling narrative sense.
But even without the visuals, “Sugar Water” is still a narrative about being in an urban environment that can feel overwhelming, separating its inhabitants from the natural world and often from each other as crowded and cramped as it can be. It’s the concrete way as named in the lyrics; the unforgiving expanse that can potentially cut one off from the wider world, and even from oneself. It is a reflection of the city as a looming presence that can swallow you up. But this song doesn’t remain in that setting for long.
Cibo Matto live at Brighton Music Hall in Boston, July 20, 2011. Miho Hatori (foreground) and Yuka Honda. (image: Chris Devers)“Sugar Water” turns that dour landscape into something that springs from a fertile imagination instead; coconut trees and the smell of sand from the southern island, conjured in a mind that has the power to transform settings, conditions, and states of mind at will. The woman who sings from the moon to the earth is arguably the narrator herself, with the evocation of moon imagery being a classic representation of female power; Viva! La Woman, indeed. This is in contrast to a world of stage techs, engineers, and record producers assuming that the women in the band don’t even know how their own gear works; evidently a true story.
“Sugar Water” is about what creativity and imagination can do for people during the mundane routines of their lives to break out of all that. It’s about finding one’s own energy to turn the inflexible cold concrete surfaces in one’s life into the romantic expanses of desert landscapes, or any other setting that helps to lend perspective and bring relief to one’s everyday circumstances and surroundings. It’s about how music itself can transport musicians and listeners alike to another place, away from the day-to-day, even when the black cat of circumstance crosses our path when we least expect it.
When a black cat crosses my path
A woman in the moon is singing to the earth
A woman in the moon is singing to the earthLa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la …
– “Sugar Water”, Cibo Matto
There’s a kind of defiance to be found in this tune; that one doesn’t have to accept what one is given on the surface if one has the imagination to transcend it. It establishes calmness, trading on a kind of ruminative trip-hop groove that acts as a backdrop for an imaginative excursion. The la la la la la refrain is like a subversive splash of daylight cast in the darkness. Like the act of eating, listening to music and indulging in our imaginations is revealed to be a kind of nourishment, giving us strength as much as any three course meal to help get us through.
Cibo Matto put out two albums before splitting amicably in 2002. After exploring new projects separately, they reunited in 2011 and eventually put out a third record, Hotel Valentine, in 2014. This was before parting ways again in 2017. It seems that Cibo Matto is a force of nature even in the lives of the two principal musicians who formed it, coming and going as it pleases.
For more about Cibo Matto and their unique impact on the musical landscape of the 1990s, read this article from 2021 about how they represented women’s perspectives at the time, and specifically Asian women’s perspectives.
And here is an interview from 2023 with musician, record producer, and Cibo Matto co-founder Yuka Honda talking about her career and how technology played an integral role in her development as an artist.
Enjoy!
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#90sMusic #CiboMatto #experimentalPop #NewYorkBands #tripHop
🔊 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #EasternEchoes
Buffalo Daughter feat. Cibo Matto:
🎵 Stereotype C
Today I was listening to "Hotel Valentine" by Cibo Matto (2014)
#music #listening #CiboMatto
오비완 케노비가 로비에서 나에게 말씀하셨다. 이 노래 개쩐다고.
"Sci-Fi Wasabi" by Cibo Matto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aqhmKfM86o
#CiboMatto #StereoTypeA #SciFiWasabi #뮤직토돈 #뮤직스키 #NowPlaying
"Sci-Fi Wasabi" by Cibo Matto.
Obi-Wan Kenobi told me in the lobby that this is one of the greatest songs ever made. And I agree with him.
다른 곳에서 언급 되어서 다시 들어보는 갓띵곡.
Cibo Matto의 "Moonchild."
지금 같은 오밤중에 정말 잘 어울리는 노래이기도 하다.
난 2000년대 중반에 이 앨범을 접했는데, 그때 진짜 무한반복으로 들었었다ㅋ
Oh man, I loved Cibo Matto back in the day. I need to listen to Scifi Wasabi again.
🔊 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
Cibo Matto:
🎵 Everybody Loves the Sunshine
https://open.spotify.com/track/5le4sn0iMcnKU56bdmNzso
🎶 #Show #playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6G4PaS9BNkIuGqMo44rbfZ
🎶 #KEXP #playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg
#NowPlaying #TheSundayStarter #SlowSunday For this album, Yoshimi (#Boredoms, #OOIOO) and Yuka Honda (#CiboMatto) drove up to the mountains, riding in the back of a pickup truck with binaural microphones, recording nature all day. At the end of each day they edited and recorded bits like piano, percussion, guitar, trumpet, vocals, etc. https://yoshimiandyuka.bandcamp.com/album/flower-with-no-color
This album is 10 years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NSGWj29BFE&ab_channel=CIBOMATTO #cibomatto #hotelvalentine #musichelps
#CiboMatto "BlueTrain" Live. May be the about the Subway or Life.
"Don't lean on me, stay on your side
Don't leave me, be by my side
Ain't no pain on a blue train
Touching my skin won't get you to my core
Don't take my seat don't make me sore
You won't feel pain for loving me more
Just sit where you can always see the door"
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