Asa-Chang & Jun Ray
Jun Ray song Chang

It's truly difficult to review such a varied and complex album as the 2002 release by Asa-Chang & Jun Ray. An album that offers very little in terms of listening pleasure, being entirely intent on constantly unsettling us unsuspecting listeners by referring to citations, sounds, and music in apparent contrast with one another. A work that represents the ideological culmination of their two previous releases from '98 and 2001.

The album starts with the unstructured "Hana", featuring spoken text over a chaos of tablas, electronic samples, and a circular string theme disturbed by unclassifiable electronic noises. "Preach" is a somewhat improbable avant-garde piece, with a town band theme played with the trumpet (Asa-Chang) over an accompaniment halfway between traditional Japanese music and the most challenging electronics. As if Nino Rota provided the foundation for Amon Tobin, just to give you an idea. The third track "Kobana" develops on a gothic and decadent melody and a deviant/singing resembling the cry of a horror doll, which would delight the late-period Radiohead. It's a strange and completely bewildering album, disturbing and in some ways hostile to distracted listening. A record for disturbed and nonconformist personalities, that's for sure. The songs (?!) are structured around short motifs repeated with a mind-bending hypnotic effect. This is the case with "Goo-Gung-Gung", based on almost traditional Japanese percussion, or "Kutsu", centered around the sound of almost traditional oboe and flutes, both flirting with the latest generation of electronic avant-garde. "Jippun" starts with a recorder, heading towards hypnotic and not at all reassuring electronic loops. "Kokoni Sachiari" is the track that most closely resembles something akin to drum&bass while the following "Tabla Bol Catastrophe" gives us a classic Indian track complete with traditional tablas over a filtered chant, and all in all "classic". With "Radio-No-Youni" the fragmentation is total: sampled bases, Indian sitars, traditional Japanese instruments, ocarinas, and unlikely wind instruments, in a bizarre yet intriguing mix. The last "Kutsu" lets us rest on a foundation of recorder and weak percussion, altogether useless.

As intriguing and ethereal as it may be found, "Jun Ray Chang Song" remains above all a record of fairly vague and undefined sounds and impressions, failing entirely to convey a project line that goes beyond simple experimentation for its own sake.
Certainly original, but not exactly indispensable.