Avant-garde Colombian singer-songwriter Julián Mayorga returns with his ninth album, a clattering, absurdist slice of post-cumbia psychedelia. Chak Chak Chak Chak is a feverish mix of angular electric guitars, circuit-bent beats, found percussion and rapid-fire incantations, with influences that include Tom Zé, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. Frenetic energy meets satirical wit. Surrealist fables entwined with defiant sonics.

Part technicolour fever dream, part polyrhythmic Dadaist frolic, Chak Chak Chak Chak is the latest full-length from avant-garde Colombian singer-songwriter Julián Mayorga, an album that brilliantly brings to life his absurdist post-cumbia infused psychedelia.
 
Broadcasting from the fertile cauldron of his current headquarters in Madrid, where he has lived for the past ten years, Mayorga has created the next compelling phase of his self-proclaimed "timbre rebellion." Inspired by the sounds of unconventional musical instruments – frying pans, mortar and pestle, knives and plates – his debut release on Glitterbeat (his ninth in all) curdles with an uncanny energy and satirical wit. 
 
Mayorga's songs are layered, multi-dimensional constructs. They evoke the illusory edge-lands that emerge where urban and rural meet, and echo memories originating in the working-class neighbourhoods of his Tolima birthplace – places abundant with greasepaint and grime, vitality and colour. 
 
It is indeed not at all surprising that Mayorga counts daring, idiom-defying musical oddballs like Tom Zé, Tom Waits, Renaldo and the Loaf, Captain Beefheart and The Residents (whose classic 1978 cut 'Semolina' is reconfigured here in an intoxicating locomotive rush) as kindred influences.
 
The album's offbeat allegories and anti-capitalist broadsides ooze tropical mischief, dystopian noise and a love for folkloric bestiaries. They are a gloriously bewildering assault on the totems of hegemony and tyranny – cultural, personal, political and musical. An unrelenting sonic cyborg engine – part-machine, part-human – with spluttering gears, gnashing teeth and stuttering cogwheels grinding up against the shrapnel alluded to in the album's onomatopoeic title.