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Rating: While most devotees are lost in Hyperdub, I, who don't even talk about working, want to start a journey that will lead step by step into the abyss of Japanese post-music. It happens at the workplace where, illuminated by the undefined sun of the Po Valley, which has nothing to envy of the nuclear circle of Tokyo programmed by mr. Eye, I share through headphones the rejection of standard logic, vent my craving for dance electronics, internalize the egotistic pleasure of the drug high, and get moved in front of the disguised, seemingly calm almond-eyed hysteria.
The Boredoms, in the person of the "Commander", on vacation at Disneyworld rave destination, plan an electrotechnical carnival with drills and inexportable beats. An affair that swells right from the start (the 3.31 of "Beats from Banaspati", airport madness in slow-fast 4/4, metal filaments reminiscent of the Ruins of Reversible Sabbath, and rhythmic pills from a psychiatry manual) and that immediately communicates the yielding sensation of not being able to resist staying still or serious in front of Jap-(re)visions of drum'n'bass, excited egalitarian samplings of bongos, metal-dance riffs, tablas, children's laughter, Urdu tongues, spitting Michael Rother diving onto hang drum, Roland scraps, cultured jazz xylophones and pianos, inserted from time to time like PCP suppositories into criteria-less house pieces, Jungle Bass skeletons "Greetings from Pattaya", progressive infernos, industrial stop & go, and ethnic-pop numbers of lucid mastery*.
The flaw, rather, if one really wants to consider it, is its merit: a "totalitarian" vision of music, which forcefully makes unthinkable mixtures "natural" and incendiary, like this 26-piece concept that with infinite goabong indifference and cascade upon cascade of beats ("Malm") goes on to make an alarming bongos jam ("Soul-E Stomp") and ends up getting lost in the pneumatic void of high-absorption flanger in which naval engines navigate in breakbeat stress for steel dawns ("Emplia"), quickly meandering into jawdropping acapella house for geisha voice ("Burrega Theme") conveyed into cyanotic tunnels of Indo-Chinese industrial with samples of some mysterious oriental ceremonial chordophone, jungle organs of commendable ugliness and oriental obtuseness (The metronomic insistence of "Weddel Seals", the kraut-karaoke rap devastation of "Dis Poem '99", Germanic start, dub pit stop piano side (Takagi Masakatsu in tears forced to eat his sheet music), then closing in carcass synthtrance-progressive in a plastic dawn in the Balearics reconstructed in Osaka).
In the moments where crumbs of wisdom fall from Goofy's hat, it is the Yellow Magic Orchestra that allows Eye to consult the book of secrets; the pupil rewarding the masters with pure tea of Kraftwerk-goes-to-Japan wisdom ("It sounds Like Liquid Skies" is vocoder-pop from an Olympic pool vernissage), then indulges in 6 minutes of metallic percussionism for Casio alarms and Australian Jungle with a toxic didgeridoo that lost its way home ("Sanganoobo"), and revs techno motorcycles that would make Tom Rowlands blush (with envy) ("Royal Mosambique").
Like a maestro-san Eye hides the sirens of perfection: just under a minute of "Visions", an emblematic piece, which lines everyone up with a muted progressive circus that within seconds rises above the mechanical God and explodes into a solo for kitarrisms "Kommune 2" with the small Japanese antonian choir doing the melody ("The Last Sheet").
Pure spectacle and separate note, for the benefit of those who haven't already stopped reading, (let alone listening to the record...) the teka of tablas sung in hi-speed on hardcore belts ("Soothe Your Soul") and the gamelan recited in a mysterious language sent to hell in high-tension samba for unqualifiable dancehall ("Let's go To Mars").
A giant, presumptuous, onanistic, and maximalist record simultaneously, impossible on the skin, Nazi in the stupidity of themes, obtuse in the "freedance" logic, anarchoid and intransigent in quoting and shaking ethnic and electronic, kraut and profane, immense in mocking the "composed" European electronics and a harbinger in the logical chaos with which this plausible hypothesis of the future music is structured. Hopefully!
Indispensable at any cost.
*(The whole, which is not at all normal, flows serenely, as if it were standard to enter a store and ask for Dj Pica Pica Pica without someone immediately notifying the day center and taking us back in vinculis to sip the broth cut with Dalmadorm).
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