Notable new Japanese releases and reissues
My Twitter feed recently has been full of grim stories about the challenges facing touring artists at the moment, so it’s as good a time as any to splurge on music (you know, like they did in the 1990s). Here are some of the releases that have caught my attention over the past month or two, with the usual apologies to everyone I’ve left out.
Tenka – Hydration
Métron Records
Daisuke “Meitei” Fujita adopts a new alias for this high-concept ambient project, which comes in a pricey limited edition packaged with a fragrance created by scent designer Ryoko Hori. Without the additional olfactory input, Hydration sounds an awful lot like what would normally get tagged as healing music, though I’m not sure who’s keeping track of such distinctions any more. I’ve always preferred the less beat-oriented side of Fujita’s Meitei work anyway, so this isn’t without its appeal. Synths drift like mist over a constant, densely layered burble of environmental sounds, sounding at times like Fujita has stepped away from his gear and let nature take care of the rest.
BlackLab – In A Bizarre Dream
New Heavy Sounds
Osaka doom duo BlackLab’s name is a portmanteau of their two biggest influences, though until now it’s been easier to hear the Sabbath than the Stereolab. In A Bizarre Dream redresses the balance (a bit) by recruiting none other than Laetitia Sadler for a guest appearance on the motorik ‘Crows, Sparrows and Cats’—which is actually one of the weaker tracks, though at least worth hearing once. The duo are more convincing when they play dumb, as on the furious thrash riffage of closer ‘Collapse’, while ‘Lost’ is practically grunge.
Soloist Anti Pop Totalization – In The Beginning Of A New World
Tonn Recordings
No, it’s not some long-lost minimal synth classic, but the new-old sound of Rikinari Hata. As Soloist Anti Pop Totalization, Hata’s dedication to mining the full potential of an extremely specific sound palette is pretty impressive (the whole thing was made with the vintage trifecta of Roland SH-101, TR-606 and MC-202). After starting in the DAF zone, the album gets more expansive: a cover of ‘Zahyō-ten’ by Hata’s old band, The Warm, is like Suicide in torch-song mode, while closer ‘Another (Hommage To Golden Hair)’ goes full kosmische en route to a cheeky synth-pop coda. My normal reaction would be to dismiss this out of hand as pointless retro fetishism, but there’s no denying that it’s pretty addictive.
Boris – Heavy Rocks (2022)
Relapse Records
The third in Boris’s Heavy Rocks series keeps up the ferocious form of recent full-lengths No and W, while packing some genuine surprises. Yes, there’s a gabber track (‘Ghostly Imagination’), but for my money the most welcome innovation is the addition of saxophonist Kazuya Wakabayashi, whose squealing alto makes ‘Blah Blah Blah’ an album highlight. It’s unashamedly stoopid, with a few songs so screamingly maximalist they’re verging on Andrew WK, while ‘(not) Last Song’ is anguished piano balladry in the Trent Reznor tradition. Buffalo Daughter’s Sugar Yoshinaga is back on production duties again, meaning that—like W—the whole thing has a conspicuous digital sheen that won’t be to everybody’s tastes.
Mikado Koko – Songs To Our Other Selves
One Little Independent Records
Picking up from her recent collaboration with Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine, Mikado Koko has gone and remixed Rimbaud’s 1985 synth-poetry opus, Acts of Love: 50 Songs to My Other Self. With hat-tips to Dada, Burroughs and Gee Vaucher, she subjects the recordings to various “generative cut-up algorithms,” which often sound like someone getting freaky with a CDJ, full of stuttering cut-ups and fast rewinds. Like the best psychedelics, it’s best taken in carefully controlled doses. For all the surface-level whackiness, Koko’s de-/reconstructions are surprisingly respectful to the originals—and bonus points for getting released on the same label as Bjork, eh?
Meiteimahi – Sonzai toshite no ishi
Self-released
There was a weird trend in the late-1990s for bands to open their albums with a noxious, wilfully experimental track, as if trying to scare off casual listeners before they got to the good stuff. Meteimahi do something similar here, at least if your definition of “noxious” means a mewling piano ballad. What follows is rather more appealing, combining the timbres of no wave—rasping electronic drums, buzzsaw guitar, and stentorian, don’t-fuck-with-me vocals—with a heightened, gothic sense of drama.
Ramza – Whispering Jewels
AWDR/LR2
While he’s perhaps better known as a beatmaker for the likes of C.O.S.A. and Campanella, Ramza’s solo work has taken an increasingly abstract turn. Originally created for a performance by dance company OrganWorks, Whispering Jewels might just about pass for ambient, but it’s distinguished by a delightfully wayward sensibility. Each of the lengthy tracks has a tendency to stray playfully off-course: gauzy synth-clouds are pierced by sudden bursts of vocoder (‘immortal’), a Steve Reich piano figure accelerates into a wheezy drum machine stomp (‘Dithurambos’), and a twinkling keyboard counterpoint dances around AI voices trying to count to 10 (‘Ballad’). Available here.
Ooyamada Daisanmyaku – Zolpidem
Zouen Keikaku
When former indie rockers embrace electronic music, the results tend to be pretty tepid, but this solo project by former Matashita 89 vocalist Ajima is a blessed exception. Her music as Ooyamada Daisanmyaku bears the obvious influence of Aphex Twin’s ambient work without being merely imitative, and is explicitly psychotropic in intent. Named after the sleep medication better known as Ambien, Zolpidem is ostensibly designed to induce a tranquil slumber. But if you do manage to drift off while listening to these agreeably warped miniatures—all smeared surfaces and wobbly pitches, with shades of The Caretaker and Richard D James at the peak of his Eric Satie obsession—you can expect to have some very peculiar dreams.
Heidi & Marucoporoporo – Please/Keep in mind
Self-released
This bowled me over the first time I heard it. Two artists from the outer fringes of the acoustic singer-songwriter-whatever scene, Heidi and Marucoporoporo are a potent combination here, the former’s Josephine Foster-esque vocals and finger-picked guitar given an eery shimmer by the latter’s FX pedal chain. The two songs were recorded and mixed entirely on a cassette four-track, and opener ‘Pleasure’ wears a patina of tape hiss, Heidi’s voice seeming to emerge from the ether. The second track, ‘Keep in mind’, also appears in a superior remix that ups the Grouper vibes. Damn nice.
Tomoyuki Aoki & Harutaka Mochizuki – S/T
Nashazphone
This 2014 album by guitarist Tomoyuki Aoki and saxophonist Harutaka Mochizuki (who are still active) was originally released in an edition of just 200 CDs, so good on Cairo’s Nashazphone label for rescuing it from obscurity. It’s the kind of thing that would have slotted comfortably in the PSF catalogue. Opening track ‘Majiwaranu Niju’ sounds like an epic freak-out where someone forgot to hit record until a few minutes before the end, but for the most part, the duo prefer a haunting, echo-heavy blues in the vein of Les Rallizes Denudes. Mochizuki’s frayed, wavering sax tone can sound like a wounded animal, which is fitting.
Kukangendai – After
Ulyssa
Listening to Kukangendai, I’ll find myself nodding along the way I might with noise music—it’s not like the trio ever lay down a steady groove that they don’t then immediately start picking apart. After continues the band’s drift away from the muscular attack of Jimen and Palm, but this is still intensely focused and fiddly music: an intricate lattice riddled with deliberate flaws. It’s as if they took all the problems inherent to livestream concerts—the audio glitches, the latency issues—and folded them into their sound. If last year’s Tentei reminded me a little of early Tortoise, the chiming acoustic guitar on a couple of tracks here suggests Kukangendai may have been supplementing their diet with some Gastr del Sol. The music builds to a climax of sorts on closer ‘Friction Kills Letter’, except the wall-of-noise guitar is buried way in the mix, like watching distant explosions light up the sky.
Kazuki Saita, Hiroko Mugibayashi, Soichiro Mihara – Moids
BasicFunction
When an album comes with an insert card full of circuit diagrams, you know it means business. These recordings of a sound installation come with the usual “you had to be there” caveats, and the 15-minute opening track is arid stuff. Things pick up with ‘moids ver 1.0,’ which sounds like a canon for cicadas and hospital equipment, while ‘moids ∞’ could pass for one of those ASMR campfire videos that were all the rage at the start of the pandemic.
Keisuke Taniguchi – Conscene
tissue★box & ASC
A surprise, this one. Taniguchi plays with hardcore band Tiala, but he takes a markedly different tack on this set for solo contrabass. From the opening ripples of harmonics on ‘whiod’, it’s a quietly absorbing set, recorded in a way that really captures the physicality of the instrument. Taniguchi deploys droning arco, extended techniques and some understated looping, though there are also a few passages of radiant lyricism. After the rawness of the preceding tracks, the closing ‘arafes’—in which Taniguchi’s percussive thwacks and gimbri-like riffs get sent through the digital blender by Atsushi Arakawa—feels all the more discombobulating.
Sauceman – Tori no wasuremono
Kool Switch Works
Nice stuff from Tokyo’s D.J.G.O. under his Sauceman alias. Most of the tracks skip along at footwork tempos, but the whole thing is light and breezy enough for the chill-out room, layered with birdsong and gamelan chimes. Whether it’s worth 12 dollars at current exchange rates is your call.
Hitomi Moriwaki – Subtropic Cosmos
Guruguru Brain
Percussive, psychedelic bedroom pop with occasional Southeast Asian accents from Fukuoka’s Hitomi Moriwaki, who created the album as a form of escapism during the dog days of the pandemic. It’s distinguished (not necessarily in a good way) by Hideki Urawa’s soupy, reverb-heavy production, which seems to sound better on headphones than speakers—like rays of sunlight reflected in a muddy puddle. Moriwaki isn’t much of a vocalist, and spends more time delivering her lyrics in a breathy, sing-song rap that’s a bit like early Daoko. The best tracks are the most garish (‘RPG’ is giving me flashbacks of the carnival procession in Satoshi Kon’s Paprika), and with all but two of them clocking in at under three minutes, they don’t outstay their welcome.
Kei Matsumaru – The Moon, Its Rollections Abstracted
Diskunion
You shouldn’t judge an album by its cover, but Kei Matsumaru’s 2020 debut suggested that the saxophonist might have more than a passing appreciation for ECM. That’s still audible on his follow-up, though this confident and wide-ranging set couldn’t be dismissed as mere imitation. Once again, Matsumaru is accompanied by pianist Akira Ishii, bassist Hideaki Kanazawa and drummer Shun Ishiwaka, whose 15 years spent playing together as Boys Trio has made them a well-oiled machine, able to follow their leader through both tightly composed passages and more abstract terrain. There are a few pieces that opt for a lyrical, muscular acoustic jazz, though the most arresting moments come when tendrils of electronics creep into the mix. Matsumaru has recently been playing in Eiko Ishibashi’s band, and she guests here, including a vocal feature that would have fitted comfortably on her 2014 album Car and Freezer. (Also available here.)
E.O.U – estream
PAL.Sounds
Described as an “album-sized mixtape,” E.O.U’s latest is a (mostly) beatless drift through alien landscapes where the colours are so vivid they hurt your eyes. Apparently it’s based around sample collage, though it ain’t exactly The Avalanches. At the release show in Tokyo recently—where he played crouched in front of a giant statue of a Chinese pug—E.O.U seemed to be playing tracks off CDRs and processing them until the contours were gone and all that remained was radioactive smears of light. Opener ‘Ohayou’ is one of several tracks here that evoke the headrush of The Field’s first album, like split-seconds of ecstatic bliss suspended in time.
A Taut Line – Loss
Diskotopia
The summer that OK Computer came out, I think I actually spent more time listening to a compilation from the previous year called Clubbed Out, which I’d picked up in a discount bin at Our Price and featured a pretty respectable selection of chart-adjacent downtempo and ambient. It was the first thing that came to mind listening to Loss: it’s that combination of breakbeats and feathery synth pads, informed by a dub sensibility that would have had Andrew Weatherall nodding in approval. You can imagine serotonin-depleted ravers twitching along while curled up on the sofa with a spliff in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. The production is too crisp and detailed to risk being mistaken for a period artefact, though Matt Lynne does indulge in the odd bit of shameless nostalgia, notably the pitch-perfect jungle revivalism of ‘Inflex.’ The album risks outstaying its welcome by putting the two longest tracks last, though that’s a very minor complaint.
Mai Mao – Ricshari
An'archives
Free improv duo Mai Mao (aka guitarist Kyosuke Terada and bassist Shizuo Uchida) released a pair of albums this autumn, and I haven’t even got around to the second one yet, but the first is pretty fine. It’s a lot less abrasive than Terada’s work with Huh, but just as packed with surprises and warped humour. Passages of frantic scrabbling that make me want to shout “fast and bulbous!” get sucked into sonic black holes and halls of carnival mirorrs. I’ve no idea what kind of electronic interventions the duo are using here, as they manage to warp their instruments into a springy cartoon goop that sounds a bit like Carl Stone remixing Derek Bailey.
Foodman – Percussion Oyaji
Longform Editions
When I caught Foodman live in a non-club setting recently, it felt like having an out-of-body experience at a super sento. His contribution to the Longform Editions series conjures a similar vibe: all the rubbery tones and fidgetting, trebly percussion you’d expect, but without any rhythmic grid to hold things down.
The Hatch – Shape of Raw to Come
Jusangatsu
The Hatch’s 2018 debut was an inspired post-hardcore barrage with jazznik tendencies, reminiscent of the great 54-71. On their sophomore album, it’s all gone a bit Mars Volta. The arrangements are sprawling and proggy, taking in everything from metal to bossa nova, lounge jazz to drum’n’bass, while trombone-toting frontman Midori Yamada has swapped the screaming for a ragged croon that always seems to sit at a weird angle with the rest of the music. There are moments during the second half that brought back unwelcome memories of Suchmos’ The Anymal, though when The Hatch pull out the stops—as on the album’s raging centrepiece, ‘volvo’—they’re untouchable.
Natsuki Tamura – Iyaho
Bandcamp
There’s a genuine spirit of experimentation to this home recording by veteran trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, on which he ransacks the kitchen for percussion instruments to complement his plaintive melodies. The album also features prominent vocals: bursts of ebullient nonsense that are making me think of Akira Sakata, especially when Tamura dips into a thick, raspy growl. The whole thing has the feeling of eavesdropping on a jazz savant conducting a bizarre folk ritual behind closed doors, possibly while drunk. You can take that as a recommendation.
a0n0 – City Lights
Superpang
Sendai’s a0n0 is constantly searching for the sweet spot between beauty and harshness, the shitstorm and the sublime. On the producer’s second release for Superpang, pillowy ambient chords get buffeted by blasts of digital noise so intense they make your ear canals tingle. The title track sounds like trying to listen to Fennesz in the middle of a blizzard, while there’s a bucolic keyboard melody buried somewhere amid the layers of high-frequency static on ‘Rros Coad’. And call me crazy, but the closing Onokio remix of ‘Life’ sounds like a funhouse version of Burial’s recent ambient work (i.e. better).
