Over the course of her time as high priestess of Acid Mothers Temple &
The Melting Paraiso UFO, Cotton Casino became more and more a featured
figure in Makoto Kawabata's shamanistic psych troupe, her pristine
vocals leading the cultish family unit into more heavenly figures, her
chanted mantras on records like Univers Zen Ou De Zéro À Zéro and Mantra
of Love the spiritual spirit-guides on unexpectedly beautiful sets.
Recently, however, it was announced that Cotton would be departing AMT,
assumedly to concentrate on her own solo work. We Love Cotton, the
first official entry into her discography, marks a radical change of
pace from those who'd grown used to seeing her cloaked in all those
psychedelic shades. Colorfully composed entirely on various
synthesizers, the disc favors the ersatz over the earthen, its variety
of spacey presets and plasticky synth-tones conjuring fluorescent-lit
environs in which the overall effect seems retro-futurist without being
like, y'know, retro. Of course, this is just to Western ears that the
idea of synth music seems strangely quaint and 20th century. In all
likelihood, songs like "Place" and "Road" are responses to, or
reinterpretations of, the most shiny, disposable J-pop; the
cutesy, Casiotonic tones of the former going so far into the fatuous as
to seem evocative of Canto-pop. Coming at such sound from a detached
or even outsider perspective, Cotton brings a strange weight to
precedings, her adventurous musical spirit and decade's worth of time in
the underground giving this a natural grittiness that could never
survive in the charted world of the popular music biz. I'm guessing the
lyrics she's singing would provide more finite answers to this, but with
the language barrier an actual barrier in this scenario, one's left to
wonder whether her tunes are filled with weighty ruminations on
consumerist Japanese culture and the roles and expectations of women in
the popular culture thereof, or whether she's just crooning natty,
almost meaningless phrases to fit her melodic synth-songs. Cotton's
singing, here, is much different from the demure modes and moods that were
her place in Acid Mothers Temple's fried fantasias, where her singing
was draped as the embodiment of the group's holistic holiness.
Recalling the girlish tones she coyly cooed in out front of Mady Gula Blue Heaven
in the mid-'90s, here her voice is filled with capricious mischief, lurching
and wailing in league with her Casiotoned fantasias.
In staging such, there are times — especially on opener "Sunflower" —
where Cotton seems very much under the influence of Tujiko Noriko; but,
whilst Tujiko fashions damaged digitalia into dystopian song-worlds like
someone painstakingly assembling cities from thousands of splintering
matchsticks, Cotton's forays into such construction seem a little
more fumbling, a preset simplicity keeping her songs set to simple
rhythms, which contrast with the fanciful flights of her wailing
singing.
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