Band:	Muyubyosha
Album:	Skopofoboexoskelett
Style:	Avantgarde metal
Release date:	August 04, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Mirrors Turned Inward
02. Silesian Fur Coat
03. The Eagle Flies
04. The Bad Luck That Saved You From Worse Luck

How can you tell if music is actually real?

Muyubyosha, transliterated from 夢遊病者 and translating to Sleepwalker, is an entity shrouded in mystique, the kind of trio where the lack of knowledge about the people involved does actually enhance the experience. And that extends to the myriad of contributors on this album. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, this is music that feels very unreal and figuring out exactly what makes it such an unnerving experience is not always easy. I've called it dreamlike, or rather nightmarelike, but you could throw all bunch of descriptors like psychedelic or lynchian or ominous, but what all that means is that the listening experience to this works by a logic different than most music, even if the root of it is music we're accustomed to, the experience of reality as warped in dreams with dream logic is the closest comparison.

We've covered them again and again, and it's still not the kind of band where you can really grasp and summarize and contain, but also not one where it's very easy to see what each album does differently, because "music with the logic of dreams" is not all they do but also something that all of their albums seem to veer towards. What Skopofoboexoskelett seems to do specifically though, is that the lineup in terms of guest contributors is immense, with anonymous guests being credited for performing on instruments as varied as didgeridoos, qanuns, harps, cellos, and also a lot of vocals. So it isn't surprising that this also feels like the most expansive Muyubyosha record to date.

I did previously claim that Muyubyosha sound like the kind of band that could write perfectly normal music if they wanted to, and that is definitely more strongly felt here in moments like the guitar solo at the end of "Silesian Fur Coat" or the dark jazz intro to "The Bad Luck That Saved You From Worse Luck", moments that act like anchors towards the more straight-forward experience of music, a reference point to be used against the moments where the music does veer into the uncanny. From production that makes the mixing feel very disorienting and untrustworthy, to structures and textures that flow in spontaneously strange directions, and a merge of sounds one could describe as dark jazz, atmospheric black metal, noise rock, post-rock, but also not really. Close enough, but not really. Uncanny.

So the band creating a sound that is more expansive and at times more accessible and decipherable, to the point where it mimics non-avant-garde music, somehow has the opposite effect of making Skopofoboexoskelett feel more unreal. Hence why the mystique around the anonymity works, because there's something that feels like it wasn't made by humans about this. With its themes of "reality dictated by perception" as described in the Bandcamp and YouTube streams, it's only fitting that this is music that doesn't feel objectively real, and the skill involved in making this sound that very close to the point where one can also enjoy its more straight-forward musical qualities, is very laudable.