Deep In The Jungle

Photo by Yusuke Honda

With a moniker that literally means ‘naked rock,' Afrirampo have a lot to live up to. And they're pulling it off. Their out-of-control, avant-spazz wildfire first hit the underground in Japan, then the cognoscenti in the USA, then the music nerds in Europe. In little more than six months, Afrirampo destroyed every sound system and eardrum in their path—including that of Rolling Stone's Dad Of The Year, Thurston Moore. The two completely unhinged and insanely cute sisters that make up Afrirampo are Oni (guitar and singing) and Pika (drums and more singing). They unleash punk-psych in wild, improvised live sets that are scarily complex. It's as if someone peeled back the lid on your skull (because your skull does have a lid, in case you didn't know) and emptied a packet of pop-rocks and a bottle of champagne right on your brain. With only a handful of CD-Rs under their belt, Afrirampo earned themselves full-fledged membership in the heavy Japanese dudes' club, having jammed and recorded with the Boredoms, Keiji Haino, High Rise, and Acid Mother's Temple. Work on their next record (for John Zorn's Tzadik Records) was temporarily put on hold when the girls decided to disappear to Africa for two months to indulge in jam seshes with indigenous tribes. VICE: What was it like in Africa? Pika: We became really good friends with this one tribe called the "Baka." You know, "Baka" means stupid or foolish in Japanese. We lived with them, which was fun. We communicated and became connected through music. Oni: Our songs were really popular there. Everybody was singing them. What were their favorites? Oni: There's a song called "Summer is Coming" and we were just mucking around by changing the words to "Baka is coming," and before we knew it everybody in the tribe would be walking down the street singing the song we'd just made up. Pika: Yeah, we would be bathing in the jungle, singing and making sounds, then someone on the other side of the jungle would answer back by making sounds like clapping or singing back to us. We would just do that back and forth and hear the sounds reverberate through the woods. People there loved anything, as long as it was fun. KYOKO FUKUDA
Afrirampo's new album A' is out now on Acid Mother's Temple.