southern records

Slough, England
Meditation Funk

Tuu is:

Martin Franklin - water drums, clay pots, tibetan bells and gongs
Rebecca Lublinski - flutes
Mykl O'Dempsey - synthesizers and samples

Song available: House of the Waters (Voice of Yaje Woman mix) (6 mins 26 seconds)
Stereo MPEG (9.2MB), Mono MPEG (4.6MB)
Excerpts: Mono SUN-AU (360k), Mono MPEG (711k)

Working together for the best part of a decade, Tuu founders Martin Franklin and Mykl O'Dempsey initially composed installation based pieces and soundscapes for theatre and art exhibitions. Performance pieces like 'FLOW' had the audience in a time-sealed room, surrounded by a multitude of speakers, washed with waves of electronics and gong generated harmonics.

The group's first CD release came through the Dusseldorf-based label SDV Tontrager in 1992. The One Thousand Years album initially came as a limited edition of 500 copies in a wood and aluminium box. Subsequent copies were produced in the regular CD jewel case. The album is currently unavailable, but some of the pieces occasionally feature in the Tuu live set.

The title track "One Thousand Years" featured on the seminal Planet Dog "Feed Your Head" album encouraging the band into playing more live appearances. Concerts included the Ambient Weekend at the Melk Weg, Amsterdam, Passage Du Nord Ouest, Paris, the WOMAD festival and various clubs and venues in the UK.

As the concerts end there follows a three minute meditative silence during which the listener's mind slowly returns to the body, after a singular voyage into the depths of imagination and pre-history race memories.

Building on some of the areas first explored in their first album, their second album All Our Ancestors develops Tuu's spacious meditation pieces into invocational territory, a hallucinatory travelogue exploring a magical reality. New music from Ancient sources.

Water drums, clay pots, indian bamboo flute, and tibetan bells and gongs shimmer over an ocean of electronics. Samples of mantra chanting monks and arabic melodies weave in and out of the mix while the trio build and layer their mesmeric grooves.

Tuu attempt to open a window into what contemporay shamen have described as the archaic revival; the wave of ambient experimentalists tapping into the hidden dimension of the ancients. Tuu bring the archaic, esoteric, and inchoate to soaring, pulsating life.

Tuu discography

One Thousand Years CD/MC SDV Tontrager 1992
One Thousand Years (Ltd Edition 500 wood/aluminium box. SDV 1992)

All Our Ancestors (CD/MC Beyond Records 1994)
All Our Ancestors (Ltd Edition120 Handmade paper/metal tube box. Beyond 1994)
All Our Ancestors (CD/MC Waveform - USA release 1995)

Compilations:
Feed Your Head CD/LP/MC Planet Dog/Ultimate 1993
track: One Thousand Years (album version)

Twilight Earth CD Timebase Productions 1994
track: One Thousand Years (Vasel Shevchenko mix)

Ophir (CD Desaccord Majeur 1995)
track: Shiva Descending (Konrad Kraft mix)