IODI - Alarm In The Jungle: The Synthetic Side of Jodi

Regular edition in black wax.

A Paraguayan musician of German origin, Joern Wenger is a true pioneer of homemade DIY recordings since the late 60s in South America. After playing with teen beat band Rabbits, Joern formed JODI along with his brother Dirk. Building the state-of-the-art “Jodi Experimental Studio” in the basement of his parent’s house, Joern (a Stockhausen student) recorded many hours of music and self-released in 1971 a very rare LP called Pops de Vanguardia, reissued by Guerssen / Out-Sider in 2016 and now considered the first DIY lo-fi garage / psychedelic album from South America. The raw, cool and sincere lo-fi garage-pop sound of Jodi anticipated what a couple of decades later would be known as DIY or indie-pop.

During the early 70s, Joern and Dirk managed to sign a contract with EMI-Argentina, and a series of albums and singles (with a small change in the name, IODI) were released. They obtained big success and became professional musicians but this didn’t prevent Joern from continuing to experiment in his home studio, with sounds that span from lo-fi garage, proto-powerpop, proto-indie-rock and certain instrumental flirtations in bossa, Afro-Brazilian, library-music and boogie / funk styles. A selection of those tracks can be found on the album Pop Espontáneo, released by Guerssen / Out-Sider in 2018 which received top reviews in music mags like the Wire.

We now present two new albums by JODI including previously unreleased material, selected by Joern with help from JODI fan and researcher Eduardo Pietruczyk after Joern found a treasure tove of vintage reel-to-reel tapes.

Alarm in the Jungle: The Synthetic Of Jodi offers an interesting concept: Joern found some damaged tapes which had suffered from humidity and had to be dried up and carefully digitized. So, some parts of the songs included here had to be recreated and recorded again with surgeon-like precision.

“Consider JODI a Paraguayan antecedent of R. Stevie Moore or Ariel Pink" - The Vinyl District