A personal Top 10 Japan albums of the year
Given the absurd volume of music that’s getting released at the moment (plus the stacks of used CDs that I keep picking up at bloody Disk Union), I find it’s easy to keep grazing without ever spending long enough to forge a deeper connection with something. I’ve written about a fair number of new and archival releases this year, many of them pretty good (you can read my previous round-ups here, here, here and here), but there weren’t many that I kept returning to throughout 2022. These are the ones that have come to feel like good friends. The rest are just drinking buddies.
Kakuhan
Metal Zone
(Nakid)
I get a kick out of pretty much everything that Koshiro Hino does, but this collaboration with cellist Yuki Nakagawa is off the charts. Stalking the terrain between deconstructed club music, contemporary composition and free improv, Hino supplies Autechre-grade rhythmic bafflement, which Nakagawa—no stranger to electronic interventions himself—complements with scraped-metal harmonics and fuzzing drones. Especially in comparison to the rigorously controlled music he makes with Goat, Hino sounds positively loose here, his beats splatting and sputtering with wild abandon. Seriously, if you listen to one album of this list, make it this one. Available here.
Wakana Ikeda
Repeat After Me (2018-2021)
(Fresh Lettuce Records)
There’s a peculiar kind of alchemy going on here. More captivating than any of the quote-unquote ambient albums I heard this year, Wakana Ikeda’s barely-there chamber music—fragments of vocal melody, diffident woodwinds and a faint pedal note of unease—is also a poignant meditation on the nature of memory. When I spoke briefly to her after a gig at Ftarri, she described the album as having a “pop” element to it, which I guess is true in comparison to the music you typically hear at Ftarri. It hovers, tantalisingly, on the threshold of song before dissolving into uncertainty.
Shintaro Sakamoto
Like a Fable
(Zelone Records)
Ever the contrarian, Shintaro Sakamoto responded to the increasingly bleak state of the world with his breeziest solo album to date. Though it isn’t as significant a stylistic departure as the lo-fi opening track might suggest, Like a Fable is big on hooks and laced with sly humour, while offering a further refinement on Sakamoto’s parched, weirdly unplaceable lounge-pop. It’s the sound of off-season beach resorts and half-remembered childhood radio hits, marking its creator as the true heir to the 1970s work of Haruomi Hosono and Eiichi Ohtaki.
Hikaru Utada
Bad Mode
(Epic)
If Netflix’s dopey Hikaru Utada fan fiction served any purpose, it was to encourage a few more people to delve into the singer’s back catalogue. Utada has never made a bad album, but Bad Mode ranks among the best, partly because it has so little to prove. Bilingual lyrics? Sure. 12-minute acid house track? Why not. More relaxed than Fantôme, less wedded to orthodox songcraft than Hatsukoi, it finds Utada exploring fertile new ground while nurturing a stronger sense of self. That image of relaxed domesticity on the cover isn’t a calculated pose, more a statement of intent from an artist’s who’s never sounded so confident in their own skin. Available here.
The Noup
Nexpansion
(Self-released)
Takafumi Okada’s music is all about brute repetition and relentless forward motion, the kind of thing that might rattle around your head while training for an ultramarathon. The Noup’s second album hones in on the muscular minimalism teased by their debut, and at times it’s hard to tell the difference from Okada’s EBM-influenced solo project, Manisdron. I could just as easily have picked the latter’s recent Body Of Void album, though the goofy lyrics (“Kintama dasu!” – literally, “balls out!”) and recognisably human imperfections of Nexpansion gave it the edge.
Ooyamada Daisanmyaku
Zolpidem
(Taika Fasciation)
This indie rocker turned lysergic IDM producer was one of my favourite discoveries of 2022. Like Sofheso (or Foodman, come to think of it), Ooyamada Daisanmyaku seems to exist in her own little world, cocooned away from the zeitgeist. The music she’s released so far has been fairly rudimentary, but it has the kind of distinctive voice that eludes many more technically accomplished producers. Early Aphex Twin is an obvious point of reference, while Zolpidem also adds some of the patina and decay of The Caretaker. Yet if her influences are easy to spot, the way she combines them is surprisingly fresh.
Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Joe Talia
PATRICK
(Bandcamp)
The last concert I caught this year was at the reincarnated SuperDeluxe—now fittingly renamed SupernaturalDeluxe—on the east coast of Chiba. This live recording offers a reminder of the wonders that were routinely served up at the venue’s old location in Tokyo, which closed in 2019. It’s an hour of textural, slowly unfurling improv by three adept practitioners in the form, who merge so seamlessly you’d think they were locked in a collective trance. There are passages of lambent electronics that recall O’Rourke’s epic To Magnetize Money And Catch A Roving Eye, only for the group to morph almost imperceptibly into a Necks-style acoustic trio and back again.
Yasuaki Shimizu
Kiren
(Palto Flats)
In a strong year for reissues (see also: Les Rallizes Dénudés, Jigen, Hallelujahs, Akira Sakata & Takeo Moriyama…), this was the standout for me. Recorded in 1984 but never released, Kiren captures Shimizu at the height of his fourth world phase, completing the trilogy that started with Kakashi and Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi. There are tracks here that feel like a direct continuation of the latter album, with their insistent rhythms and intersecting woodwind lines, but the overall sound is heavier on the electronics. I’ve never really clicked with Shimizu’s late-80s albums (too plasticky, too brittle), but hadn’t dared to imagine that there was a whole missing chapter from the juiciest part of his discography.
Kaho Nakamura
NIA
(Space Shower Music)
Kaho Nakamura is a full-body performer. Watching footage of her concerts, the songs just seem to pour out of her. The singer’s pandemic album is all (barely) bottled-up energy, so dense with ideas that some of its songs are tossed off with the brevity of Post-It notes. She has the omnivorous, anything-goes mentality of peak Shugo Tokumaru, though with a more nakedly pop sensibility that suggests she’s been taking notes from Jack Antonoff too. In true pop album fashion, NIA is heavily front-loaded, but while it falls off towards the end, the exuberant opening stretch doesn’t get stale no matter how many times I listen to it. Available here.
Carl Stone
We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2
(We Jazz Records)
Carl Stone put out three new releases this year, all of them excellent. Whereas Wat Dong Moon Lek and Gall Tones on Unseen Worlds were as goofy and gloopy as you’d expect, this remix project is probably my favourite of the bunch, by dint of being the least familiar. Working with ten albums from the back catalogue of Finland’s We Jazz Records, Stone isn’t exactly respectful to his source material, though he seems to allow a little more of its syntax to remain intact than when he’s wreaking havoc on Ariana Grande and enka ballads. The results are truly uncanny, like a mutant offspring of Craig Taborn’s epochal Junk Magic.
