Please note: for those who like their music snappy, familiar and immediate, move on; there’s nothing here for you. Mmmm, less here than I thought. Oh well, this one’s for you good good people who like their music in >3 minute chunks. Think 40 minute chunks.
No… come back…
By the time you read this, AMT and THPU will have already released another three records, but I’ve been looking after a small child so getting around to listening to an album with a naked woman on the front and that has absolutely nothing to do with Iggle Piggle is… an excuse, a lame excuse. But let’s face it, two tracks weighing in at 18 and 40 minutes? That requires dedication.
It is… fairly rewarding though. At least one of them is. I must confess to not being completely au fait with Kawabata Makota’s previous oeuvre (it comprising of a dozen or so ‘incarnations’, each with their own style and discography… you can see how it would be hard to keep up), but when he talks about influences like Stockhausen (that most stolen of artists) and Krautrock, it is pretty clear that a musical challenge is ahead. And there’s me with nothing to toke, drop, snort or shoot. Not that I advocate that sort of thing. Oh no.
Ahem, well… ‘Astral Projection from Holy Shangrila’. The ‘pop’ number of the record (a mere 18 mins), ‘AP’ begins with a single looped and delayed voice chanting a meditative incantation; an acoustic repeats the same passage over and over; synths appear; a siren sounds; guitars rev and shatter the surface of this musical web that is entrancing you. This is pure indulgence, but you can feel levels of hearing levered open as you attempt to hear everything, You’re on the bridge of the starship freakout and don’t know how to drive. It’s scary, exhilirating; the music ebbs and flows, pushing deeper into the recesses of bad drug experience. Suns collapse, planets rend themself and you are left on the floor of a monastry full of opium addled monks all fightign over a sitar. It is a trip, a bad trip if you will, but a good modern tone poem, full of noise and intention. That it never goes anywhere for so long a time is more of an inconvenience than a deal breaker.
‘Interstellar Guru and Zero’ is a little more advanced while being simpler. Based around a constant droning A (I believe), musical shapes shift about in the background uncertainly. A drum beat marches backtrack and forth on trance patrol as tiny meteoroids spang off an invisble sonic forcefield. Things become brighter but essentially the same and an identity of sort manifests itself. It grows, but never goes. If you see what I mean.
It’s not for everyone (surprisingly! What a stupid statement) but for the patient appreciator of drone or psychedelia there definitely something here for you; for the person who’s into racy covers, there’s the nudey lady. For the classicist, it’s proof that tone poetry is a live and well and living in the head of Kawabata Makota. A curious album from a curious man.
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