It's getting hard to see it as simply coincidental that, as Kahimi Karie
gets exponentially more interesting as an artist, she's conspicuously
absent from the Western pop-cultural consciousness. Back when she was
cooing through that Lolita-pop phase as Cornelius' ingenue, Karie
fitted in with how the men of the West like their Japanese girls:
girlie, cute, coquettish. And so, she was easily sold as yet another
glossy product of Japanese consumer culture. As the years have
progressed, and Karie has shed her ingenue's ties, first from Cornelius,
and then from Momus, she's forged into a period that could easily be
called her "maturation": living in Paris, collaborating with the Olivia
Tremor Control, Add N to (X), and Arto Lindsay, and, finally, returning
to Tokyo to cultivate ongoing collaborative unions with Tomoki Kanda and
Koki Takai. It was this pair of studio-boffins, and their dexterous
editing skills, that helped Karie fully fling herself to wildly artistic
heights on her last album, 2003's Trapéziste, which found the former
Shibuya-kei queen soaring gracefully over a musical net cast far and wide. Taking
diverse sounds and influences — opera, free-jazz,
dissonant static, tropicalism, electro-pop, spoken-word — and bringing
them together through careful editing and profound juxtaposition, Karie
and her collaborateurs authored a collagist masterpiece whose rightful
place in the pop-cultural canon would be as one of
the most daring, dazzling, pretty and profound commercially-viable
pop records ever fashioned. Yet, falling victim to that tree-falling-in-the-woods axiom, her genius
symphony fell short of even falling on deaf ears, virtually unheard
outside Japan as Karie's cross-cultural star faded from "novelty" all
the way to "obscurity."
A year on, and she's returned with another amazing album, one curiously
called Montage. Again finding Karie working with Kanda and Takai, it's
actually less of a "montage" than Trapéziste, tonally working with
a
fairly consistent electronic palette, with Kanda, Takai, and even
Cornelius (who turns up, in a dramatic return, on the eight-minute
new-age-synth-sound electro-prog opus "Making Our World) working with
sounds that Karie, as the album's producer, keeps from straying too far
from its basical tonal brief. The album largely lolls along at a
languid pace, tempo-wise, doing so even though its programmed beats and
fragments of ersatz electro-tone are in a constant state of half-broken
motion, the teasing fragments that're assembled into rhythm tracks often
being truncated zips and zaps glued into place at a pace that
belies the "busyness" of the edits. The most extreme example of such
assembly comes with "Pancartes," a dizzying distillation of
often incongruous elements shattered into fragments and then
glued back together to form a distorted picture. Here, Karie has Takai
play a whole array of largely-unidentifiable traditional instruments,
with bangings of both Gamelan-ish and Pekinese Opera-esque percussion,
plus brief moments of thrumming east-Asian strings, littered through an
array of aggressive sounds more familiar to the cut-up palette:
distorted beats, static, radio-samples, street sounds, rain, atonal
keyboard squeaks, human beatboxing. Broken down into the sharpest of
snippets and striking with the same agitated agitato of the shower-scene
from "Psycho," the song finds Karie, hushed as ever, delivering a deadpan
recitation of spoken-word in French, her voice the calm amidst a raging
musical storm. In contrast to the harried and harrowing barrage of
percussive edits — which, on repeated listening, cultivate a fraught
feeling — Karie's French text details an idle afternoon in a Parisienne
café, in which surrealist daydreams frolic in her mind amidst the
familiar sidewalk-café imagery of coffee, milk, ice, fruit, and ants on
the ground.
The silly surrealism of her spoken-word (in both French and English,
with her singing tending to be in Japanese) and the wantonly
avant-gardist nature of her "pop"-music mean that Karie is, at the
moment, certainly comparable to Björk in the sort of artistic ideas she
is bringing to bear on her albums. Montage is even draped in a kind of
Björkian cover, in which a black-and-white Karie — whose discographical
back-catalogue features some of the most beautiful compact-disc art ever
(check Tilt as a prime example) — blossoms from floral bouquets,
and is digitally draped in lurid splashes of vivid computer-color. But, where
the force of Björk's persona and the stature of her celebrity have forced
the world to accept the grown-up, intelligent, stylistically-courageous
icon that has arisen since 1997's Homogenic, Karie is at enough of a
cultural distance that her artistic womanhood can be ignored, that she
can still be reduced to being a cute little girl remembered from
that moment when J-Pop briefly crossed-over as cross-cultural
pop-cultural oddity. But, perhaps, this divergence in appreciation also
comes down to the literal — and not artistic — voice of each artist.
Where Björk's wail is unrelenting, Karie is, over a decade on from her
debutante days, still whispering in the same hushed tones, her literal
voice still barely audible on these latest albums — albums where her
artistic voice is screaming at the top of its lungs.
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