Guest post by Ian Hinton-Smith
Jazzy, dubby, experimental, ambient, joyous, meditative and so much more. Fans of Mariah’s Utakata No Hibi will be visiting familiar territory here, as Shimizu is also the brain behind that long-awaited reissue from Palto Flats. There’s the same simplicity and attention to detail present on Kakashi and, having been released a year before Utakata, it appears to have been a learning exercise for Shimizu.
For starters, check out the repetitive marimba lines weaving throughout the space-jazz-dub of “Umi No Ue Kara” (a personal favourite) for a whole eight minutes, acting as bamboo scaffolding for drips of guitar and Shimizu’s sax lines which drift around it like a fine mist. Total masterful simplicity.
Elsewhere, expect ambient tracks that suddenly drop into a backstreet Chicago jazz club with dueling brass stabs and hand claps, only to drift out into smoke; abstract 8-bit sampling that could, frankly, send you a bit la-la until it flings you out into cosmic piano territory; uptempo psychedelic drama-ska; and, ultimately, the sound of Mongolian farmers having a stab at Arabic jazz!
Despite sounding a bit all over the place, there’s enough of a thread throughout Kakashi to bind it all together, and after only a couple of listens, I promise you the pieces fall into place.
Fantastic blog. So much great stuff that would be difficult/impossible to find elsewhere. Thanks!!!
Great record, some songs reminded me of Mulatu Astatke (!)
This is another great record by Shimizu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhLSdGIKqrw
thanks for yet another wonderful share, have not heard of this one before; great, top 5, music blog imo. thanks fore existing.
Smashing beats.
I’m hooked these days on Yasuaki Shimizu’s “Dementos” … and on your way how you dig into this variety of music. Your blog is a refreshing source of music, thanks for sharing.
How old is the oldest computer and when was the last time it was restarted? To find the answer to this question am I rewarded for sending a message by morse code outwards into the universe or can I just send this song? Where do you put the coolest perspectives of yourself anyway, and do you fill in random pockets of space on our interwebbed connections for the future to find with them?
Is imagination real or is it just a figment of my imagination? I don’t know but I know I don’t know why umi no ue kara begins by sounding like a very good day at work but I presume Yasuaki Shimizu has some idea
Am I heading to the top now or is the thought that I should begin a live-stream writing movement by live-stream writing thoughts into my phone and out through some sequence of tubes to an unknown number of screens just some spiritualized birth in my mind?
The same hot & cold provides a fine wave to ride on this night as it jangles ambience xylophonically up
I belt out silence into the ether with my mouth going open and shut as the sounds of ii dive pt 2 fly in and the dance is a swim straight vertically up to the light like one imagines the winning semen
Is the button enter or return or is this headache the beginning of the end I know not but that this began and continued on some audiophile mode that I’m not sure I like though I am sure I’m normal
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Is the self the quantum entanglement of the evolutionary battle of competing memories? And what does it mean when one’s nostalgic memory reinforces itself and stays with them warmly? In respect to the latter question I recognize others have a better notion than me
I write with my screen’s night light at full blast orange as I listen to bamboo houses created by Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian, so what do you expect?
A birth of a natural anthem by the postal service is a twitch genre of film where one films themselves, smokes weed, puts on their headphones, and then begins to live. A life of dancing will appear on the screen with which the viewer can put on their headphones and connect, for the twitchman chooses the volume of the music that is played and heard like palinacousis
The vault from which memory pulls is doomed to continue to increasingly pull from some artificial intelligent creation
And the distance between the idea for a prompt and AI’s written response shortens each day and the distance between the enter button being hit and AI’s response shortens each day. And I wonder when the other side is reached will it feel transcendent or mundane?
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