The Pastels' handmade/handcrafted little-label-with-the-loving-heart
Geographic debuted, essentially, as a place in which the Scottish
indie-poppers could introduce the world at large to the ad-hoc
faux-naïve big-band bashings of micro-pop maestro Tori Kudo, the leader
of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Not long after that, they issued another
"primer," putting together a compilation introducing Shinji Shibayama's
heavenly folk-psych outing Nagisa Ni Te to said at-large Western
consumers. Behind both men, of course, stand good women, and Nagisa Ni
Te, in particular, are often testament to the spiritual glories and
domestic blisses of a loving union.
This puts both these iconic artists
at odds with Takuji Aoyagi, the latest idiosyncratic Japanese artist to
get the Geographic "career overview" treatment. Aoyagi is a lonesome
soul and a wandering traveler, a man-as-island so obsessed with islands
he finds himself returning time and again to various dots amidst the
Pacific's great blue. Kama Aina means "islander" in Hawaiian, and
across this best-of-thus-far set we see Aoyagi composing
weirdly-tropical song-sketches. Ad-hoc and unpredictable, Aoyagi plays
an acoustic guitar whose strings struggle to stay in tune with the humid
heat, twanging dangling parts over cheap beat-boxes keeping rudimentary
rhythms. Inspired by various native musics of the Pacific, he
appropriates bits and pieces of tuned percussion — from traditional
Japanese gongs to dabblings of Gamelan — and mixes them amongst tunes
filled with field recordings, handclaps, and melodica. The
soundtrackist nature of the set sets it not too far from another
Geographic one-man-show, Dorset's Directorsound, but Aoyagi is much more
keen to forge into uncharted waters. He paints portraits not of
spaghetti-Western vistas, Italian cobblestone laneways, English meadows,
or any of the other favored faux-movie-score scenery; instead he invites us into
the sweaty skin of a weird Japanese gent wandering through tiny song islands
and trying to musically represent conflicting cultures and
the clash of technology with tradition. But, if you think that makes
sense, the disc also has human-beatboxing, kraut-rock rhythms,
references to various foreign-film screen sirens, fake applause, and a
knock-out instrumentalist run through a number by new-waver heroine
Lizzie Mercer Descloux that could pass for a lost Young Marble Giants
outtake any day of the week.
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