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| The Thing With Five Eyes |
Article
Some dark jazz albums descend into the night by becoming slower, heavier, and colder. Noirabesque by The Thing With Five Eyes does something more unusual. It opens the night outward. On Jason Köhnen’s Bandcamp, the album is presented as part of a new journey after his earlier dark jazz formations, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble and The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, with the record dated 1 January 2018. Svart Lava’s label page lists 15 January 2018 for the release and credits Leila Bounous on vocals and Izzy Op De Beeck on trumpet. (Jason Köhnen)
What makes Noirabesque so important for a site like yours is that it does not simply repeat the old grammar of doom jazz. It keeps the dark jazz lineage alive, but it pushes it into stranger territory. Jason Köhnen’s own description speaks of a “journey into unknown musical territories,” and that phrase is exactly right. This is not an album of conventional smoky noir alone. It carries noir into a more ritual, dreamlike, and geographically displaced space, where the city remains present but starts dissolving into desert heat, spectral voices, and a more mystical kind of drift. (Jason Köhnen)
That shift is one of the record’s greatest strengths. Reviews at the time heard the album as both cinematic and worldly. Santa Sangre wrote that the project kept some of the Kilimanjaro spirit, yet moved the atmosphere away from martinis and black gloves toward “the mystical secrets of the Middle East.” Cyclic Defrost described Noirabesque as a set of “dark cinematic visions,” hearing Arabic string arrangements, hand percussion, digitally processed rhythms, and Bounous’ spectral presence as central to the record’s power. (Santa Sangre)
This is why the album matters more than many better known names in the field. It does not just give you darkness. It gives you altered darkness. The noir in Noirabesque is not limited to wet pavement, empty alleys, and exhausted interiors. It becomes more nomadic, more ceremonial, more hallucinatory. Tracks such as “Salem,” “Hedra,” “Zigurhat,” “Nakba,” and “Selenga” already suggest that the album wants to build an imagined zone rather than a simple mood board. Even at the level of titles, this feels less like a soundtrack to one city and more like a map of symbolic ruins. (Jason Köhnen)
For your archive, this makes The Thing With Five Eyes especially valuable. You already have music that works through city pressure, urban melancholy, and the exhausted interior of noir. Noirabesque opens another corridor. It lets dark jazz move toward ritual, memory, borderland atmosphere, and a more occult cinematic language. The result is still noir, but it is noir viewed through dust, distance, and symbolic heat instead of through rain alone. That gives your musical ecosystem more range and makes the genre feel larger than its most overused clichés. (Jason Köhnen)
There is also a very strong formal intelligence in the way the album works. Cyclic Defrost heard IDM touched textures, processed rhythms, and epically building arrangements, while Jason Köhnen’s own page frames the project as a “phoenix rising” from the remains of his previous dark jazz worlds. Together, those two descriptions explain a lot. Noirabesque is not retro. It does not simply mourn the broken beauty of earlier noir jazz. It recomposes that beauty into something more mobile and less genre obedient. (Jason Köhnen)
That is where the album becomes most useful for Dark Jazz Radio. It gives you an article that is not just about another band in the scene, but about transformation inside the scene itself. The record asks what happens when dark jazz stops thinking only in terms of Europe at midnight and starts absorbing other symbolic geographies, other scales of atmosphere, other ghosts. It remains intimate and cinematic, but the cinema it evokes is wider, stranger, and less tied to the usual noir room. (Santa Sangre)
In the end, Noirabesque feels like one of those rare records that expands dark jazz without dissolving it. The noir element is still there, but it no longer walks only through the back streets of the familiar city. It crosses into ritual, mirage, and dreamlike ceremony. The Thing With Five Eyes does not simply soundtrack the night here. It opens a passage inside it, where menace becomes exotic, cinematic, and strangely beautiful in its distance. (Jason Köhnen)
Some dark jazz records enter the night. Noirabesque opens it toward mirage.
Bibliography
Jason Köhnen Bandcamp page for Noirabesque, including the description of the project as rising from the earlier disassembled dark jazz groups and dating the album to 1 January 2018. (Jason Köhnen)
Svart Lava Bandcamp page for Noirabesque, listing the 15 January 2018 release and credits for Leila Bounous and Izzy Op De Beeck. (Svart Lava Records)
Santa Sangre review of Noirabesque, emphasizing the shift from Kilimanjaro styled darkness toward a more Middle Eastern and mystical atmosphere. (Santa Sangre)
Cyclic Defrost review of Noirabesque, describing the album’s dark cinematic vision, Arabic string arrangements, hand percussion, and spectral vocal presence. (Cyclic Defrost)