WhenYoshimi P-We, all-girl noise band OOIOO’s formidable frontwoman, isn’t Battling Pink Robots on The Flaming Lips album of the same name, she’s popping up in the unlikeliest of places. You might have heard her skin-shunting in ear-splitting Japanese rock band The Boredoms, or wigging out with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in New York supergroup Free Kitten. According to Yoshimi, none of the girls could play their instruments before they hooked up for an impromptu photoshoot for Japanese magazine Switch in 1996. A year later they opened for Sonic Youth in Japan, still with stickers on their fretboards.Given that the title of their sixth record, Armonico Hewa, is a nonsensical melange of Spanish and Swahili loosely translatable as “harmonious air”, you might expect a hotchpotch of influences. Slightly more unexpectedly, and despite staying wonderfully true to their noisy Japanese roots, OOIOO (it’s pronounced ‘oo-oo-aye-oo-oo’) appropriate everything from acid-jazz to Afro-beat, Tangerine Dream-esque Krautrock to Balinese ape hollers, and wrap it up into something both upliftingly other and delightfully apocalyptic.It’s not so much an album as a collection of free-flying oddly-shaped song fragments, each more culturally disparate than the next, so it’s quite fun to list them. Sparky opener 'Sol' moves effortlessly from punky high-pitched feedback to tribal house tune via Pere Ubu circa 1978, while 'Polacca' has a peculiar brand of African funk getting its wind chimes stuck in a blender. On 'Honki Ponki' extended instrumental indulgences, zany scattershot rhythms, and rhythmic spoken poetry to rival the Tom Tom Club (or the Um Bongo juice drink ad) give way to playground sing-songs and Brazilian beats. And 'Orokai', with its fanfare, claps, and chorusing cast of cutesy characters, wouldn’t sound out of place as a Japanese stand-in for The Magic Roundabout theme tune ”“ at the very least it’s one hoot short of a kazoo circus. But from the rocketing trajectory of Nin Na Yama’s spacy guitar to the Californian woozy on 'Agacim', it’s all fucking cool.Symptomatically, in their unbridled wildness, some tracks inevitably lose their way - not too much. surprisingly only three are over six minutes - but like the streets of some alien metropolis, there’re worse places to get lost in. Even if, with our ears ringing, we’re left wondering whether to scream like a baby, mock-up a dance routine, or slip into something more comfortable.

Buy the album on Amazon | [itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/polacca/id332583700?uo=4" title="Ooioo-ARMONICO_HEWA_(Album)" text="iTunes"]