Woo
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong
Independent Project Records
Maps were of little use to Woo, whose cosmic Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong album went off in all different experimental directions. The kaleidoscopic 1982 debut LP from the brothers Ives, Mark and Clive, was wildly adventurous, sounding like both the future and the past all at once, sending mutating elevator music down a colorful, analog rabbit hole of psychedelic jazz, free-range pop bliss, and ambient electronica.
An extravagant new CD reissue revisits a wonderfully strange and intoxicating record that still feels like the discovery of an alien musical universe. How the project came to be is a tale — initially set in a London flat in 1980 — told in enlightening liner notes, the siblings enjoying mostly unfettered creative freedom and losing themselves in recording whatever catches their genre-defying fancy while trying not to disturb the neighbors. Theirs is an interesting history, as is that of the record itself, which finds Woo winding through trippy, synthesized mazes of Eno-inspired design, only more vibrant.
Although “Swingtime,” the warm, ever-evolving opener, aspires to prismatic, Can-like grooves, whereas its spacey, atmospheric successor “Pokhara + C.H. Revisited” eventually erupts into a frenzy of blips and beats, “A Wave” offers a dreamy expanse of feathery acoustic guitar strum, and “The Cleaner” is a light flurry of gentle, wavy Spanish guitar. Vocals emerge from hiding in the otherworldly blur of “The Attic,” the rare track with singing of any kind here, while the electronic squiggles and squelches plus woodwind flows of “Wah Bass” shake things up, and more liquid pieces, such as “The English Style of Rowing” and a clip-clopping, clarinet-infused “Razorblades,” float on, their rippling surfaces slightly disturbed.
Grafted seamlessly onto the remastered version of Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong, comprised almost entirely of instrumentals and widely acclaimed upon its release, is a mini album of Woo ‘70s and ‘80s rarities. “Tibetan Trains” is an undulating, gauzy, New Age beauty, while “Lovelorn” and “Ruby Ruby” are just as lovely — all three ethereal examples of the delicate, painterly brushwork of Woo, whose impressionistic playfulness resulted in brilliant maneuvers, such as the stormy dissonant shift in “Baa Lamb.” Sandwiched between soft jazz flutter and spiritual meditation, it is a chaotic episode of sheer madness, followed by calm wonder. Woo moved in mysterious ways.
