Ju Ju Space Jazz are a hard crew to deal with - their sounds aren't easily pigeonholed despite having the word 'dub' in the title of their album Head Over Heels In Dub, and their interview-style means that they are the bane of any music journo's life. It has taken three weeks, a one-hour telephone interview, and finally an email conversation with the very personable Daniel and Alex for what follows to come to fruition. To give you, the lucky reader an insight into the lives of Ju Ju let's take a short question/answer journey . . .

Briefly and as a bit of background, Ju Ju Space Jazz are an open-ended group working frequently with guest instrumentalists from percussionists to violin players, saxophonists, guitarists, analogue squelch technicians, vocalists and Edwina Blush , who they assert is in "a category of her own". Apart from their many live performances and a CD released a few months back on Fluid Records, for whom the closely aligned Harry's Laundry and Telegraph Pole also record, they have composed music for contemporary dance-theatre and independent film.

"Think about it - a dark and dripping forest somewhere. It's humid, close, cloying. A sickly sweet smell rises from the spongy forest floor, fertile, wet, dangerous. And in the middle of all this you stumble across Ju Ju - whether it's a skull tied to a post, a monkey waving a palm frond, a snake with your initials inscribed in it's scales, or an old crone with blackened teeth shrieking with laughter from a tree stump - that's Ju Ju . . . .

"Ju Ju is 'kind of' a complete experience, you can find Ju Ju in any medium. Ju Ju comes from Africa, although the workings are universal. Ju Ju is about the unexpected, the spooky, the ridiculous, the fantastic - all that makes the hairs on your arms stand up and wiggle. We have written Ju Ju music and worked on events, images, graphics, a language, symbols, mythology but it's not like we have any kind of monopoly on Ju Ju . . . . we'll be leafing through a real estate blamph and come across some curious thing and go - woah - Ju Ju. Of course I think we're probably the only people doing Ju Ju Space Jazz though".

"We like to take a whole bunch of different elements and ideas to create what we call 'Stewp' - a cross between stew and soup. Food is very important to us. We make music like we make food. We rub it all over our bodies and copulate like we do with music. It's a process of experimentation - start off with a basic sauce - a flavour, then add colour, shoe-wax for texture and spices, heat and stir, until - voila, you have something much more that the sum of it's constituents. Or you have an evil smelling pile of baking powder, hmmmm. It's all in the timing . . . . We spent about six months in the studio recording before we played our first event; we weren't actually even thinking about playing live at the time, but someone heard a tape and boombah, we were being asked to do gigs from Byron Bay to Melbourne. The energy and work put in to make these things happen meant that someone off the street could walk into a space that was totally transformed not only in a visual way, but also everything from the air to the floor had been given a purpose. It is not an easy thing to describe, but anyone who has experienced something like this will know what we're saying . . . The vibe on a juju dance floor is pretty special; its not like four on the floor where everyone is just going for broke, up and down and there have been gigs where we have started playing to an empty room and by the end of set we look up and the dancefloor is packed with people doing the strangest things. For example, we've had a room full of people moving and swaying to what was essentially ambient - no beats. When we play we go through different moods and people sit, stand on the heads, wiggle about, it's unpredictable - you never can tell but there is always this feeling of - 'ooh, that's kind of special'. It has something to do with the reason we enjoy spontaneity, philanthropy, weird music and the night sky. Nowadays what you seem to get is a bunch of gum chewing, evil eyed fashion victim teenagers with faces like the concrete that spawned them hanging outside bunkers with their bottles of $4.00 water - Ugh.

"The scene was really alive and vibrant in that brief time between when it found its own identity, then someone suddenly realised you could make a buck out of it. Hey! The rolling juggernaut of economic orthodoxy. Now the nature of the dance scene is simply that of another assimilated youth movement - what used to represent anti-authoritarian and anarchic intent has now been converted to another way of disempowering, fragmenting, and pacifying a youth culture. Its like 'Here kid, shutup and listen to this CD, suck on this lollipop and save up for these clothes'. Fuck that shit - pick up your balaclava and run like hell!".

"The flip side to this increasing fragmentation and loss of meaning is of course the rise of fluffy toy hooliganism which is something that should be encouraged in every way possible. We mean this quite seriously too. Fluffy toy hooliganism is a serious social phenomenon that not a lot of people are talking about at this point . . . we still suffer from the cultural cringe (although that's changing) which dictates that people have no idea of the quality of music coming out of Australia. England has been looking over here for innovation for a little while now, and the music we're hearing here is amazing. So many bands, little labels, studio projects, whatever have cropped up and are doing there thing - total quality - in the last year its awe inspiring. But of course the same cultural cringe dictates that there is almost no money in it and no-one takes it seriously. But people are still doing it. Great - keep it up - One day it'll be recognised and public radio seems pretty fresh still, I guess because, again, there's no money in it - no need to cater for the lowest common denominator".

Yellow Peril

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