From the melting pot of New York's East Village come two ultrahip and very tasty expatriate Japanese music-makers, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, calling themselves Cibo Matto. That the name (pronounced "cheebo motto") means "food madness" in Italian is appropriate: the female duo sings about things to eat (apples, beef jerky, artichokes, birthday cakes) on all 10 tracks of their debut album, Viva! La Woman. And even if the record's lyrics are generally nonsensical, food makes for a great text: ripe with metaphors, it's sensual, colorful, irresistible, and quite universal. But as in another East Asian export--the 1994 Taiwanese film Eat Drink Man Woman--food is the canvas on which the artists paint their story, and not the story itself. Cibo Matto could just as easily stand for "sample madness." Sound, not taste, satisfies their appetite, and the disparate ingredients they pop in the blender--ambient bursts, random noises, hip-hop breakbeats, trip-hop swirls and churns, Afro-Cuban percussion, muted cool jazz trumpets, funky bass and keys--produce a sonic collage of rhythms and melodies that makes for some of the most successful sampler-based songwriting to date. Like Soul Coughing --a similar-minded downtown New York outfit--Cibo Matto don't replace real playing with sampler loops, they just bring the sampler into the mix as a limitless source for all the crazy sounds their conventional instruments can't get to. And like the Beastie Boys, Cibo Matto compose music the way kids play with toys--so naturally and so ecstatically it makes us all want to come out and join in their irrepressible fun. --Roni Sarig
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