Higucci: Nobody

Perhaps for fear of not being considered progressive enough, the tendency of many microsound-releases has been to be more Raster-Noton than the Raster-Noton collective themselves, stripping already bareboned matrixes of sine-bleeps and rippling sheets of white noise of their last musicality. On „Nobody“, his iTunes-only debut recorded and painstakingly refined over the course of the past two years, Tokyo-based Higucci is taking the exact opposite approach, leaving the emotional void of these works behind in search of a more spiritual vocabulary. His music still makes use of intricate cut-up techniques and cool machinal rhythms, but instills them with a deeply romantic yearning for human warmth and tangible emotionality as well as striking instrumental craftsmanship– no wonder Ryuichi Sakomoto is already acting as a patron of his music in Japan.

On the third of „Nobody's“ eight untitled tracks, a pensive piano is placing plaintive patterns on a canvas sparsely filled with sentimental hiss, sad strings and romantic choir echoes. On the fifth, the instrument is firing off angular percussive impulses, as it is ducking angry robotic fusillades. Similar motives are carefully spread out over most of the material, but these references to traditional melody and harmony are never just clever quotes, but harbingers of the exciting fusion the genre has long promised but failed to deliver: Higucci has gone beyond the mere abstractions of many of his colleagues and, astoundingly, arrived at an all the more progressive statement.

Homepage: Higucci