Kahimi Karie started out life, pop-culturally speaking, as ingenue,
and so it's been no surprise that she's been sold, throughout her
glittering and ever-growing discography, as some sort of ultra-cutesy
Kewpie doll, an annexation of the old-fashioned sexual politics that
still reign throughout Japan and throughout the music biz itself. She
being merely the one looking pretty whilst doing the breathy cooing
over songs served up to her on a silver platter by the
intellectualist men — Cornelius, Momus — doing all the
legwork, their work some sort of public display of their love for
her. Of course, it's hard to say such with too stern a face, given
glittering histories of such unsurpassed unions as Shadow Morton and
The Shangri-las, and Phil Spector and The Ronettes; but it's no
coincidence that Trapèziste — Karie's first album
where she's been in artistic command — has seemed to end up as
her least-celebrated record thus far, receiving scant attention from
those pop-devotees outside of Japan who've usually fussed over her
stuff. Which seems strange, to these ears, given that this gear is
grand and vast and weird and utterly fearless in chasing its
idiosyncrasies, swinging for the artistic bleachers as Karie's
trapèziste swings higher and higher, close to the glittering
stars, tumbling high into the night without the regular safety-net of
having, say, Momus waiting open-armed below, with his assuredness and
typical conceptual grandiloquence. This time, it's Karie handling
conceptual duties, and the album — with the help of studio
collagists Koki Takai and Tomoki Kanda — is like a series of
disparate desires and fragmented fragments smoothed into one
magnificent whole, a sprawling masterpiece of thoughts drawn tightly
together, delivered with a slick veneer of production and packaging
that translates off-kilter ideas into grand-scale spectacle. The
album often plays out like a stage show — brightly-lit,
carefully orchestrated, harking back to times when public performance
lifted the public's spirits — that stages its disparate
song-to-song scenes like chapters of a story. Of course, rarely would
a song-and-dance delivery get as strange as things do here, with
Takai and Kanda's detail-centric efforts of cutting-and-pasting
drawing together all manner of amusical sounds that litter the disc.
A definite sense of studio-assemblage goes against the idea that this
could be played in the pit on the night by an orchestra/arkestra. The
running, indeed, flips from spoken-word dream sequences, to
sophisticated summery-electro-pop bathed in radio static, to
Areski/Brigitte Fontaine/Art Ensemble of Chicago-styled free-jazz
blow-outs (one growing out of the noise of a milling crowd, and met
by staged applause), to a peculiar take on the iconic "Habanera"
sequence from Bizet's Carmen, to a number whose swing-era jazz
band gets cut up into attenuated soundtracks — for burlesque
dancers, circus clowns, performing elephants — whose stops and
starts are spliced together in unnerving fashion. Thematically, this
all gets tied up in the album's title track, in which Karie, singing
in French, plays a Parisienne trapèziste who is persecuted by
fellow performers because of her black bloodlines; this story plays
out whilst blasts of blood-lipped horn honk squeal in squalls calling
for her mulatto hide, only for each call to be drowned out into a
droning sea of belligerent brass that seethes below whilst the
trapèziste hurls through the air in flights of free-jazz
freedom. This whole record is blessed with the same sense of graceful
motion, it being the masterful product of an artistry in Kahimi Karie
that has long laid dormant.
|
