follows a combined review of recent releases by elfish echo and bisk,
written for the www.burnmedia.com site...full reviews with cover art (well,
at least the elfish echo cover...) and tracklisting are available
there...thanks for your indulgence.
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Elfish Echo.Sato Yumiko
KM20
CD
Bisk.Time
Sub Rosa
CD
As any who've even scratched the surface of the history of American and
European electro and techno are no doubt aware, in addition to the mighty
Kraftwerk and the odd Gary Numan/Human League references, the weirdo piece
of the historical puzzle in the music's continuing evolution has belonged
to Tokyo experimentalists Yellow Magic Orchestra. Formed by composers
Ryuchi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono in the '70s, YMO fused synth-pop beats
and avant-garde orchestration with fizzy electronic strangeness, a
concoction that was the tequila slammer to 'werk's (nonetheless
intoxicating) dry brau. Left-field tracks like "Computer Game,"
"Technopolis," and "Nice Age," while hardly breaking through to pop radio's
heavy rotation lists (at least in America), nonetheless had a formative
influence on crucial groups like Cybotron, LFO, Global Communication, Atom
Heart...even Underground Resistance! Oddly, however, the legacy of YMO in
their home country has been limited to only a handful of innovators--Tetsu
Inoue, Ken Ishii, Susumu Yakota, Tanzmuzik--who, though brilliant in their
own right, have (with the possible exception of some of Ishii's more
whitecoat releases and Tetsu's work with Hosono on _Hat_) sought not the
electronic madness that drove YMO into the creative unconscious of
musicians the world over.
The release, then, of a pair of albums in recent months by Japanese
artists--Bisk's _Time_ and Elfish Echo's _Sato Yumiko_--give serious cause
to the question of just what exactly has made it into the water over there.
Like YMO, Bisk's Naohiro Fujikawa and Elfish Echo's mysterious conspirator
aren't simply content with what they've inherited. Seeking creative
impetus through an inspired, almost deranged extreme of stylistic mutation,
each draws elements of electro, techno, hip-hop, jungle, jazz, ambient, and
house together, not simply in serial connection, but in sophisticated
process, superimposing stylistic features to such a degree that they begin
to blur into what can begin to be called truly original styles. In Bisk's
case, that style is a taut, warped, at times paranoid brand of electro-jazz
with severe, occasionally bewildering polyrhythms and extreme,
ear-wrenching sounds and textures bent and shaped into the unlikeliest of
musical configurations. In tracks such as "Bit 1" and "Transition," shards
of heavily-treated trumpet, piano, double-bass, even vibraphone are
scattered about among skittering electro breaks and jazz fills, with
syncopation suggesting drum'n'bass' intricate rhythms and the dissonant
blurts of electronics at once recalling contemporary classical and the most
outbound of experimental techno, but with nothing really sitting still long
enough to be nailed down to any one genre. Similarly, Elfish Echo's _Sato
Yumiko_ (named for a noted Japanese urban designer) flits freely from style
to style, instrument to instrument, orchestrating samplers into arrays of
beguiling complexity. Flirting with house, electro, jazz, and
drum'n'bass--often within the same eight bars!--_Yumiko_ is literally (read
that again) impossible to pigeonhole, making its overwhelmingly intuitive
musicality that much more astonishing. And while _Sato Yumiko_ carries a
slight edge over Bisk's _Time_--with looser, jazzier arrangements and a
warmer, more diverse sonic palette--both combine an unflinching
experimentalism with smart, accomplished musicianship, resulting not only
in two albums of superior achievement, but also in volumes of new
possibility in the various contexts from which they draw. A truly
remarkable combination. SC
Rating: 8.3 (Elfish Echo) / 8 (Bisk)
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sc
onnow: va : deepnet (side effects)