AOKI TAKAMASA is an accomplished and experienced Japanese electronic musician living and working in Paris. Singer TUJIKO NORIKO is equally well established. Together they have already played at Barcelona's Sonar Festival (2003) and more European gigs are likely as news of this first release on Fat Cat filters through.
The album is simply wonderful. Alongside MOBY, FOUR TET and BOARDS OF CANADA it offers a sumptuuos other-worldy music for mass consumption that has integrity, grace and charm.
TUJIKO NORIKO's voice is a large part of that charm, offering that human link to the impossibly complex layers of sound that an electronic palette offers the composer. On a song like "When The Night Comes" there are harmonious and regularly pulsed sounds alongside and across machine noise that has the effect of beautifying the machine rather than uglifying the organism.
If squeaks, clicks and rasping white nosie are not what you think of as music, I defy you not to be beguiled by this album. If you already take what I'm saying for granted, and want a little more terror on your timpnaic membrane have a go at the gongs and depth charges of "When The Night Comes" – just before the fifty Buddhist monks start going "aaahhh, ooohh". It’s still gentle, but it’s not unthrilling. Breathtaking is distinctly part of the offer.
Inevetiably the human ear refashions the abstract music into bells, choirs, water drips, bird song, geological shifts and winds and tides. Each sequence and combination tugs at some uncertain emotional state. But by worknig on the sequences and the contexts of each sound, TAKAMASA and NORIKO really do keep re-energising the soundscapes so that a listener can take different interpretaions and different emotions from each song, and from each separate listening of each song. This is most definitely not automaitc or lazy block-wielding stuff. Pay attention, or you'll miss something crucial. Subtlety, careful shifts and inventive flashes flcker and glide through every track.
|
"26th Floor" uses sampled vocal elements (I assume in Japanese) from a range of sung, spoken and whispered situations. They are put against some disconnected pulses in deep bass and super-high ranges to create a mysterious and beguiling drama that has as mushc erotic attraction as it does uneasy tension. It’s exciting stuff. Someone somewehre is being dragged heavily across a concrete floor. Somoene else is watching, unwatched, though a window into another's soul.
The two fingered Korg riff at the beginning of "Alien" could be a Karaoke Classic about to launch. Its house-vibrating bass line, a little way in, and the beautiful tune ravish it into drop dead and gorgeous territory to accompany any dream you like. I think you should be inventing our own stories for each song. What's that irrepressible giggle in final track "Nolicom"?
So, 46 minutes, eight tracks, two accomplished artists (both aged 28). And Fat Cat's impeccable reputation. I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t order it now.
|
