This is Video of the Week from Wales Arts Review. We’ll be showcasing some of the best art in Wales with a new video shared every week. From music to drama and everything in between, videos will not be limited by medium. Today’s video marks the return of a 90s ‘dream project’ with the release of Das Koolies’ new video for ‘The Condemned’.
This week’s Video of the Week features some familiar faces, and voices, as a past fades out for a future to begin as the long-running, secretive Das Koolies ‘dream project’’, emanating from Cardiff’s post-industrial docklands, delivers its first consignment of complex, wired euphoria: ‘The Condemned’. Chains of decayed connection and shackles of genre-expectation are audibly broken as Huw Bunford, Cian Ciarán, Dafydd Ieuan and Guto Pryce re-route their paths as notorious scientists of sound, taking the outside lane to arrive close to where it all began for Super Furry Animals. Soldering human touch to synths and samplers, Das Koolies come through on their manifesto pledge of incinerating acoustic guitars while unsafely loading as much noise-making machinery onto their studio mains supply as possible.
Das Koolies’ genesis lies in the nineties, half-a-decade between chapters and subject of rumours ever since. Super Furry Animals’ first gig, in Bangor in 1993,was a 30-second, chemically-and technologically-compromised flash of light, a set of techno-indebted electronica curtailed that could have altered history’s course. Onwards to Real World studios in 1998 and the recording of the classic, semi-experimental Furries’ album, Guerrilla and Das Koolies reconvene between World Cup goals and label meetings to go off-piste and quietly resuscitate their ideals of the early-90’s. The band was then boxed and stored safely for reanimation.
Das Koolies’ 2023 reformation, return to the studio and schedule of releases establishes a democratic artistic state, setting free ministries of music, performance and visual art in line with the members’ original vision.
‘The Condemned’ is the first single and title track to be released from an upcoming four-song EP, released on digital and limited 12” vinyl formats on Fri 10 March 2023.
