-
neumu
Friday, March 29, 2024 
-
-
--archival-captured-cinematronic-continuity error-daily report-datastream-depth of field--
-
--drama-44.1 khz-gramophone-inquisitive-needle drops-picture book-twinklepop--
-
Neumu = Art + Music + Words
Search Neumu:  

illustration
44.1kHz = music reviews

edited by michael goldbergcontact




Editor's note: We have activated the Neumu 44.1 kHz Archive. Use the link at the bottom of this list to access hundreds of Neumu reviews.

+ Donato Wharton - Body Isolations
+ Svalastog - Woodwork
+ Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet
+ Rosy Parlane - Jessamine
+ Jarvis Cocker - The Jarvis Cocker Record
+ Múm - Peel Session
+ Deloris - Ten Lives
+ Minimum Chips - Lady Grey
+ Badly Drawn Boy - Born In The U.K.
+ The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls Together
+ The Blood Brothers - Young Machetes
+ The Places - Songs For Creeps
+ Camille - Le Fil
+ Wolf Eyes - Human Animal
+ Christina Carter - Electrice
+ The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
+ Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye
+ Various Artists - Musics In The Margin
+ Rafael Toral - Space
+ Bob Dylan - Modern Times
+ Excepter - Alternation
+ Chris Thile - How To Grow A Woman From The Ground
+ Brad Mehldau - Live in Japan
+ M Ward - Post-War
+ Various Artists - Touch 25
+ The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
+ The White Birch - Come Up For Air
+ Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
+ Coachwhips - Double Death
+ Various Artists - Tibetan And Bhutanese Instrumental And Folk Music, Volume 2
+ Giuseppe Ielasi - Giuseppe Ielasi
+ Cex - Actual Fucking
+ Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
+ Leafcutter John - The Forest And The Sea
+ Carla Bozulich - Evangelista
+ Barbara Morgenstern - The Grass Is Always Greener
+ Robin Guthrie - Continental
+ Peaches - Impeach My Bush
+ Oakley Hall - Second Guessing
+ Klee - Honeysuckle
+ The Court & Spark - Hearts
+ TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain
+ Awesome Color - Awesome Color
+ Jenny Wilson - Love And Youth
+ Asobi Seksu - Citrus
+ Marsen Jules - Les Fleurs
+ The Moore Brothers - Murdered By The Moore Brothers
+ Regina Spektor - Begin To Hope
+ The 1900s - Plume Delivery EP
+ Alejandro Escovedo - The Boxing Mirror
+ Function - The Secret Miracle Fountain
+ Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
+ Loscil - Plume
+ Boris - Pink
+ Deadboy And The Elephantmen - We Are Night Sky
+ Glissandro 70 - Glissandro 70
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #2)
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #1)
+ The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics
+ The Glass Family - Sleep Inside This Wheel
+ Various Artists - Songs For Sixty Five Roses
+ The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
+ Motorpsycho - Black Hole/Blank Canvas
+ The Red Krayola - Introduction
+ Metal Hearts - Socialize
+ American Princes - Less And Less
+ Sondre Lerche And The Faces Down Quartet - Duper Sessions
+ Supersilent - 7
+ Band Of Horses - Everything All The Time
+ Dudley Perkins - Expressions
+ Growing - Color Wheel
+ Red Carpet - The Noise Of Red Carpet
+ The Essex Green - Cannibal Sea
+ Espers - II
+ Wilderness - Vessel States

44.1 kHz Archive



peruse archival
snippet
    
artist
Kahimi Karie
recording
Montage
Victor
snippet
rating


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.


by Anthony Carew




-
-snippetcontactsnippetcontributorssnippetvisionsnippethelpsnippetcopyrightsnippetlegalsnippetterms of usesnippetThis site is Copyright © 2003 Insider One LLC
-