Angry horses ! The sisters Patty and Selma Bouvier ! Raymond Scott wandering through a madhouse garden !
Nice and funny Gonzo Circus review of ‘Hokus Fokus’ :
” …Yes,Bram Bosteels hides himself in the countryisde, far away from trends and hipsters.Also in what we’ll call ‘the Miasmah-universe’ for the sake of convenience this time, Bosteels operates from the periphery.
No dark black images or gothic letters on the cover from “Hokus Fokus”, but a pale version of Shrek, wearing a purple cape around the shoulders and holding an xl lollipop in its hands. A Kaboom Karavan concert is usually a graceful performance in which the 3 members ( besides Bosteels, also Stijn Dickel and Fred VandeMoortel ) are like having a wrestling match with loads of ‘gear’ : bricks, pianohusks, acoustic guitars etc…KK’s great merit is that this arsenal of soundmaterial always serves the sound, and never just falls into a kind of ‘look-at-us circus showoff’.The mood on HokusFokus is more exuberant and more percussion-oriented then on ‘BarraBarra’, the songs are more complex and free form.
This aside, KK still operates in a parallel universe where Stan Kenton, Raymond Scott and Svarte Greiner are wandering through the paths of the madhouse garden.
In the ‘Tourette translated to music’ track ‘KipKap’, the presstext refers to Tom Waits, but we hear the sisters Patty and Selma Bouvier.The melancholic waltz ‘Lovzar’ is filled with windinstruments, organs and strings floating around dynamically. Eerie atmosphere, but really stunning.For clarity : Kaboom Karavan doesn’t descend into he same deep dark caverns as Kreng or Svarte Greiner.Therefore there’s slightly too much humour in the music.No musical side-splitting jokes, but odd and funny, disturbed sounds such as the kazoo-like-fanfare in ‘En Avant!’ or the skullpercussion in ‘Sardonis’. But more than just ‘ominous’ or ‘humoristic’ , Hokus Fokus is a generous record, in which you can submerge and wander about endlessly.”