Hapna Rec. 
A Taste of Ra (II) (S,2006)***
With a name like this, it is easy to be reminded of Sun Ra. But there is no real direct reference. Ra not only is the Egyptian God of the sun, I consider the sounds of its name (based upon some self-penned theories and experiences I will not explain here further) to be related with a life and structural challenge giving energy, eventually, in tempo, and with its own time schedules. It is some odd combinations of tempo’s mixed, that seems to be some architectural idea behind the group’s recordings. I read on Boomkat this group is rumoured to be a project by Swedish Will Oldham collaborator Nicolai Dunger. I don’t know who this is. I only know there is seemingly a singer-songwriter at work who delivers songs but also improvisations and the aforementioned sound architectural ideas. The building-project foundations are first of all the recognisable songs, which are double-dubbed in the same way as Devendra Banhart, making comparable associations in a wider sound experiments context, and with its own feeling of a freedom of the singer-songwriter-blues or -jazz or -mumbling. The instrumental arrangements are the most bizarre thing. There it seems that the acoustic guitar tangling is often one step away in tempo from the singing, while the flute is already a few steps away, and the sax reaches even the edge of control, with more freedom and a bit of free-form. To that, here and there, very old vinyl recordings (real or faked and slightly jazzy), mix in, more like chaos, finding a calm responding conflict in the present music. To bend all this together the improvisations stretches from a controlled edge to the edges of freedom. The background chorus accompanies here and there in lalala, nanana and tadada form. After all these arranged expressions, based upon song, improvisation and oddly combined tempo layers, the last two tracks are a bit of a different conclusion. “The Fox and the Frog” sounds like a fairytale narrated by a female narrator, in a rather Witthüser & Westrupp mode, with the tangling acoustic guitars, moody flutes, hand percussion rhythms, and some nanana and leyleyley vocals evolving to an instrumental outro where every element harmonises to an almost inner-celebrative feeling, campfire-warm, and like a carpet improvisation, expanding to overloads of nana, lala en aaaa and even iii, with the well fitting, in such methods of improvisations, harmonium, besides some additional layer of violin improvisations. Interesting !
