Rise and Shine, Campers!

Lady and gentlemen campers, unfasten your seat belts. This audible journey requires comfort of the body and release of the mind. We even recommend you to lay down your seats, so that you thoroughly enjoy the excursion. Take a pill of biodramina to relax your senses and enjoy the freedom that emerges from this music. Your body is going to float in space like an astronaut, thanks to the musical notes of our group of eccentric melodic campers, Biodramina Mood.

We warn you that you have never experienced music like the one you will hear during this flight. Only perhaps in the band’s first album, Magnetic Centrifuge, that already displayed the amazing visual capacity of their music and the Martian and evocative quality of the group’s instruments. We congratulate their captain and composer, Antonio Fernández, for creating a sound cocktail that our ears had never sampled until now. The steel, surf and jazz guitars run smoothly in the fabulous network created by Chiaki Mawatari’s tuba, Lucía Díez’s cello and Vera Garrido’s marimba: three instruments that exchange the rhythmic and melodic roles with the accuracy of a hit-and-miss comedy. Their timbres intermingle but never get mixed up. On the contrary, they create a multi-layered music with perfectly differentiated where the marimba’s watery sound tiptoes over the warm and nostalgic notes of the cello, while the tuba seems to smile with the comic and pompous sound of its steady step. Here, Raúl Rodriguez’s drumms creates the delicate rhythmic screenplay that connects the rest of the characters. He gently beats the plot, the network, the agile and subtle details of the story but also lights the rocket’s fuse when necessary. Passengers, let’s take off.

Rise and Shine Campers! Our journey begins. Grab a surfboard and sail across the first waves of “Hup!”, a surf rock and roll that leads us to take the plane of “Quick! To the Airport!”, a swing that would definitely seduce Henry Mancini, with the film noir intro that gives way to a giddy jazz piece. Then, we open our imagination with  “Flying bed over the Polynesia” in which the slide on the steel guitar strings makes us dream of exotic paradises and faraway gardens. You will be able to sneak into a detective movie thanks to the mysterious melody of “Mr. Kaplan”, homage to Hitchcock’s character in “North by Northwest” that grows in intensity before bursting into an explosive guitar pluck. Absolutely memorable. Besides, you will not forget the gloomy beginning of “Robbery at the Casino of Monte Carlo”, in which an amazing cello riff preludes a sequence of guitar and marimba that allows us to visualize the whole burglary. After the heat of the moment, nothing better than to refresh ourselves with “Strange Aquatic Bird”, an underwater journey of instrumental counterpoints that evokes the dancing of fish within coral reefs. After, you can swim up to the surface and stroll around Nino Rota’s Italy, luminous and fun, the perfect carnival setting for “Take your mascarpone”, the polka that brings an end to this fascinating excursion. So many adventures whet one’s appetite, so we might as well take a break and eat the dream-like “Nuts on the Table”, a lullaby that reminiscences our childhood longings that placidly leads us to the tropical sounds of “Banana Split”, an exquisite shake of influences, garnished with calypso and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. And after relaxing, time to enjoy the journey’s most melancholic ballad: “You said three, but you’re five”, with its breathtaking cello.

After stuffing ourselves with these fascinating sounds, you might, however, be of those that always say “Just can’t get enough”, recalling Depeche Mode’s classic. Well, feel free to repeat it while you enjoy Biodramina Mood’s amazing version, in which the percussion becomes a marimba, the bass guitar a tuba, and the voice, a guitar. The expression “unheard-of” was definitely coined for a band like Biodramina Mood, specialists in sounds that your ears have never had the chance to sample.

Rise and Shine, Biodramina! Rise and Shine, Campers!

Text by Javier Gallego