''IC-01 Hanoi'' is an instrumental album by New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, released on 26 October 2018 through

Jagjaguwar Jagjaguwar is an American independent record label based in Bloomington, Indiana, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Jagjaguwar is a label included in Secretly Group, which also includes ...

. It is the group's second album of 2018 after '' Sex & Food'', released in April, and their first instrumental album. The album was recorded entirely in the city of

Hanoi Hanoi or Ha Noi ( or ; vi, Hà Nội ) is the capital and second-largest city of Vietnam. It covers an area of . It consists of 12 urban districts, one district-leveled town and 17 rural districts. Located within the Red River Delta, Hanoi is ...

, Vietnam, and originated from sessions for ''Sex & Food'', with frontman

Ruban Nielson Ruban Nielson (born 20 February 1980) is a New Zealand musician, singer and songwriter, best known for being the frontman of the psychedelic rock band Unknown Mortal Orchestra. One of the most acclaimed New Zealand musicians of his generation, he ...

's father, Chris Nielson, also contributing instrumentation to the record. The first single, the nearly 10-minute ambient and freeform "Hanoi 6", was released on 25 September 2018. The album was promoted by a series of shows across Europe and the UK, as well as Asia and several in Mexico.

Music

The album has been described as a "sonic distillation of the band's influences in Jazz,

Krautrock Krautrock (also called , German for ) is a broad genre of experimental rock Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments ...

and the avant garde", as well as

experimental jazz Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz and experimental jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. It originated in the early 1950s and developed through to the late 1960s. Orig ...

. It was influenced by the works of

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of music ...

Critical reception

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, IC-01 Hanoi received an average score of 66, based on eight reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Reviewing the album for '' Pitchfork'', Andy Beta felt that "Ruban Nielson throws off his habitually weighty themes and digs into a refreshingly raw, heady session of psychedelic rock", also saying that the album "presents a visceral, smoky, casual session that cooks together fairly tumultuous moods over the course of its concise runtime".

Track listing

Personnel

Unknown Mortal Orchestra *

* Kody Nielson * Jacob Portrait Additional musicians * Minh Nguyen – sáo trúc * Chris Nielson – flugelhorn, keyboards, saxophone

References

{{Authority control 2018 albums Instrumental albums Jagjaguwar albums Unknown Mortal Orchestra albums