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The definition of 'world music' is something absolutely generic, and as far as I'm concerned, it's not always understood correctly and is often used to define anything different from English or American pop/rock music or electronic and experimental music; in any case, something that's considered 'exotic' because it comes from countries that mostly are not part of North America and Europe or are perhaps realities coming from Eastern countries.
In other cases, it's also understood in the sense of 'folk music,' meaning that music believed to constitute the popular and historical cultural heritage of a specific nation and/or ethnicity. Since I am Neapolitan, for example, I could recognize in this definition the historical heritage of the so-called 'Neapolitan song,' from its distant origins in the centuries up to the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, and on to those that are mostly considered as degenerations in more recent times. But this is an issue that frankly, I'm not very interested in delving into at the moment, although I still want to highlight how I consider what is defined as 'classical' part of my cultural heritage and, in any case, something of absolute value on a historical and cultural level. Lyrical and poetic. Besides being strictly musical.
On the other hand, why deny it, if we refer to the more popular tradition, that of the farce, the frottola, the ballad, the 'villanella,' and even the tarantella, which are something many ascribe to the definition of 'world music,' I not only do not relate to it, considering this at most as 'popular music' in its most vulgar sense (using the term in its sense of 'common' and 'linguistic expression in forms and characters proper to the popular classes) and as something that today, no matter where in the world you are, is absolutely self-referential, like the forced use of dialect expressions or, using some metaphor, reciting a mass in Latin.
So what is 'world music'? As far as I am concerned, this definition has a proper sense only if it refers to something that concerns not the expression of distant popular customs and traditions, but the contamination and encounter between different cultures to create something that can be completely new and novel, therefore in some way experimental, or constitute in any case a true cultural experience of meeting and mixing. Something international. The 'future humanity' of 'L'Internationale' according to the Italian translation of the original text by the French Eugène Pottier and Pierre de Geyter.
Fortunately, episodes and record productions of this type abound and are continuously increasing, and many of these also have commercial reach or, as far as the independent music world is concerned, are not something irrelevant. I like to emphasize when introducing this album, once again the central role in this sense and the absolute quality of the productions of my 'favorite label', namely Thrill Jockey Records in Chicago, of which the two authors of this work, Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa, can be considered as two historical collaborators.
'Are Euphoria', released last June 16, is the third album marking the partnership between the two Japanese artists and the follow-up to 'Savage/Imagination' (2014). Based in Tokyo, the two musicians can be considered as two of the main 'agitators' of the Japanese metropolitan music scene, and for this third episode, they have involved an incredible number of musicians, including Yasuaki Shimizu, Motohiko Hamase, Mono Fontana, Joe Zawinul, Steve Shehan, considering in this sense the work as something open to the meeting of different experiences and personalities. The definition of 'fusion' refers more to their conception of collective performance than to a strict definition of musical genre and technical characteristics.
Co-produced by Co La aka Matthew Papich, the album's starting point is inevitably traditional Japanese music and culture or even the more experimental side, boasting in this sense Japan a decent tradition that apart from universally popular and recognized phenomena like an influential personality such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, has been detailed and brilliantly narrated by Julian Cope in the twin work of 'Krautrocksampler', that is 'Japrocksampler'. I would not underestimate the fact that one of the most relevant figures in the field of artistic experimentation made in the USA, namely Jim O'Rourke, has chosen Tokyo as the base for his 'operations'. We're talking about what can be considered one of the capitals of the world: a metropolis inhabited by over fifteen million people and as such something that in its conformation completely escapes our typical idea of a big city understood according to typically European canons.
The album consists of seven compositions of minimal music where experimentalism in the field of electronics meets ambient music in a play of defining cosmic spaces dedicated to reflection with hypnotism and obsessive repetitiveness in the sound of dub-step and electro-beat elements as well as kraut-rock.
The final result is a work I would not define as monumental because it in no way wants to be sumptuous, but rather instead the manifestation of a certain expressive need that is the result of a community. The expression of a cultural model, certainly, but that is new and current.
The album opens with '7.000.000.000 Human Elements', a track that immediately highlights some of the typical elements of the album: the obsessive repetitiveness of the electronic percussive bases and the use of reverberated voices, the use of suggestive and evocative echoes and at the same time elements of jazz and fusion experimentalism in a progressive crescendo of over five minutes with a multiplication of sound overdubs and the particular introduction of a vibrato effect at the end.
'Benbelo' initially refers to certain tribalism in the percussion and to the use of vintage electronic pop of the Yellow Magic Orchestra brand, evocative sounds mixed with the use of traditional string instruments creating a particular ambient effect and what appears more than a 'vaporization' of the sound, a real fragmentation of spaces that more than minimal I would define as infinitesimal and in an endless rain of crystalline sounds and echoes once again reverberated and overlaid in an evidently artificial and altered way.
'Zaaab' develops on a minimal electronica beat musical base but evolves after an ambient frenzy session not far from that of the previous textures, in a completely unexpected manner assuming the form of a kind of cinematic episode, a slow-motion version of Ennio Morricone's 'Mission' theme. Until a final collision in a triumph of reverbs and electro-music impressionism that's decidedly original.
This album represents a continuous escape from conventional and predefined forms, as if it were a kind of free-form in digital and electronic format. 'Yaikele Ya Ma' is an ambient session dominated by a reverberated bass foundation shot in loops with electronic musical suggestions that reference Harmonia by Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Michael Rother and more generally kraut-rock at its most minimal and from soundscapes. 'Akubi' almost resumes the same timings as the previous track, changes at the same time completely the atmospheres, and plunges us instead into a dimension of meditative calm inviting us to imagine distant landscapes of the same Japan and cyber worlds, once objects of imaginative reproduction and today constitute virtual realities accessible to all of us, all fueled by some dubstep motoring and traditional sounds that refer to a kind of dronic samba played slowly.
'Haha Mori' is a succession of electronic ghosts moving on a minimal instrumental base and flutter on a time punctuated by the sound of distant atonal bells and what appears to be remixes of sounds and ballads from the folk traditions of the Far East more recognizably by their character than their melodies.
'Elastic Astral Peel' finally surely brings to mind some moments of Sakamoto from 'Neo Geo' or 'Beauty', but the sound develops growing and increasing in overdubs and rhythm until it explodes into a noise confusion that we imagine could ideally represent the elusive and constantly transforming identity of a city as fascinating as it is necessarily mutable like Tokyo.
It is objectively an album of rare beauty as unexpected. Certainly, when approaching it, expectations are nonetheless high for those who already know these two musicians, but there is no doubt that in this instance they have surpassed themselves and have given life to a series of compositions - and thus an album - perfectly successful. Beyond being valid on the purely experimental level, they help redefine correctly that principle of 'world music' to which I refer in the introduction of this review and which at this point I can only define as mutable too. Just as likewise mutable over time - and in sounds - is society and our way of being in the world.
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